Iran's politics: elected offices inside an appointed frame

Who holds final authority under the constitution

Article 5 of the constitution gives the leadership of the community, during the occultation of the twelfth imam, to a just and pious faqih, a jurist of Islamic law. This is velayat-e faqih, the governance of the jurist, the doctrine Ruhollah Khomeini developed in exile and wrote into the constitution approved in December 1979. Britannica describes the result as a mixed system in which the executive, parliament and judiciary are overseen by several bodies dominated by the clergy, with a ranking cleric at the head of both the state and the bodies that oversee it.

That cleric is the Leader, rahbar. Article 110 gives the office the general policies of the state, command of the armed forces, the declaration of war and peace, the power to call referendums and the appointment and dismissal of the six clerical members of the Guardian Council, the head of the judiciary, the head of state radio and television, the chief of the joint staff and the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Leader also signs the decree confirming an elected president in office. No term limit applies.

The Assembly of Experts chooses the Leader and may dismiss him. Its members are clerics elected by popular vote for eight-year terms, and the sources differ on its size: the Iran article on Wikipedia gives 86 members, Britannica gives 88, and the Iran article's account of March 2026 refers to an 88-person assembly. Article 109 requires the Leader to have the scholarship to issue rulings in Islamic law, justice and piety, and political judgement. Article 111 provides that if the office falls vacant a council of the president, the head of the judiciary and a cleric of the Guardian Council holds its duties until the assembly makes an appointment.

How the Guardian Council filters candidates and laws

The Guardian Council has two jobs, and both decide who governs. The first is legislative: every bill passed by the Majles goes to it, and Britannica describes it as acting in many ways as an upper house. A bill falls if a majority of the council finds it contrary to the constitution, or if a majority of its six clerics finds it contrary to Islamic law, and the council can return it to the Majles with revisions. Where the two sides cannot agree, the Expediency Discernment Council, which Khomeini set up in 1988, arbitrates.

The second job is electoral. Article 99 gives the council supervision of elections to the Assembly of Experts, the presidency and the Majles and of referendums, and it approves or disqualifies candidates for local, parliamentary, presidential and Assembly of Experts elections. The Guardian Council article on Wikipedia records that 476 people applied to stand for president in 2009 and four were approved. Britannica records that before the Majles elections of February 2004 the council disqualified almost half of a pool of about 8,000 candidates, including some 80 sitting deputies, and reinstated some of them after the Leader intervened.

The filter applies to the Leader's own electors. The Assembly of Experts is elected from candidates the Guardian Council has approved, and half of the Guardian Council is appointed by the Leader the assembly is meant to supervise. The Iran article notes that the assembly has never challenged a Leader's decision or tried to dismiss one.

What the president and the Majles decide

Article 113 makes the president the highest official after the Leader and head of the executive, except in matters reserved to the Leader. The president is elected by direct vote for four years and may be re-elected once in succession. Article 115 requires candidates to be of Iranian origin and nationality and to believe in the principles of the Islamic Republic and its official school of Islam, which Britannica reads as a requirement that the president be a Shia Muslim. Until July 1989 a prime minister ran the government and the presidency was largely ceremonial; the referendum of that month abolished the post and moved its powers to the president.

The president names the ministers, who need a vote of confidence from the Majles, chairs the Supreme National Security Council under Article 176 and appoints part of the Expediency Council. The Iran article records eight vice-presidents and a cabinet of 22 ministers. The Leader is consulted on the ministers for defence, intelligence and foreign affairs, and the Iran article describes the Leader as having the final word on foreign policy.

The Majles has 290 members elected for four years. Article 64 set the original number at 270, with room to add up to 20 seats for each ten years after the referendum of 1989, and it reserves five seats for the recognised religious minorities: one each for Zoroastrians and Jews, one shared by Assyrian and Chaldean Christians and two for Armenian Christians, one from the north and one from the south. The Majles passes laws and the budget, ratifies treaties, can question and remove ministers, and can impeach the president with a two-thirds majority, according to Britannica.

How the courts and the Revolutionary Guards fit in

The head of the judiciary is a senior jurist appointed by the Leader for five years under Article 157. Britannica records that all judges must base their rulings on Islamic law, that the Supreme Court struck down in 1982 the parts of the monarchy's codes that did not conform to it, and that the Majles rewrote the penal code in 1983 to include retribution and corporal punishment. Revolutionary courts hear cases defined as crimes against national security, and their verdicts cannot be appealed. A Special Clerical Court set up in 1987 tries clerics outside the ordinary judiciary and answers only to the Leader.

Article 150 keeps the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a separate force with the role of guarding the revolution. The armed forces are organised in three parts: the regular army, the Guard Corps with its own ground, aerospace and naval forces, its Quds Force abroad and the Basij militia, and the police command. The Iran article describes the regular army as defending the borders and the Guard Corps as protecting the system from foreign interference, coups and riots. The United States designated the corps a foreign terrorist organisation in 2019.

International bodies have recorded abuses against the state's critics and minorities. The Iran article cites a group of UN experts in 2022 on the persecution of religious minorities, including Baha'is barred from universities, and the United Nations describing the response to the protests that began in September 2022 as crimes against humanity. Article 13 of the constitution recognises Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians as the only religious minorities.

How factions compete without strong parties

Parties exist and are weak. Britannica records that the constitution permits associations but not parties opposed to the system, that the Islamic Republic Party, which dominated the first years, was disbanded on Khomeini's order in 1987, and that the Tudeh Party, the Mojahedin-e Khalq and the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan were banned. Elections turn on personalities grouped in loose camps: principlists, who call themselves guardians of the revolution's principles, reformists, who want a more open system and better relations abroad, and centrists between them.

Reformist presidents have won large votes and then met the limits of the office. Mohammad Khatami took more than two thirds in 1997 and was re-elected in 2001; Britannica records reformist newspapers closed one by one and student protests in July 1999 put down. The disputed result of the 2009 presidential election brought protests over alleged fraud. Britannica dates the sidelining of reformists to the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from 2005 to 2013, and of centrists to the period after Hassan Rouhani's terms from 2013 to 2021, which it says left the principlists with almost unchecked power in the 2020s. The voting age is 18.

The system has also had to replace a president mid-term. Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash in East Azerbaijan province in May 2024, with his foreign minister, and an early presidential election followed.

How the leadership passed in wartime

The office of Leader has changed hands twice. When Khomeini died in June 1989 it chose the president, Ali Khamenei, whose clerical rank Britannica describes as low for the post at the time. Britannica records that senior clerics then urged his acceptance as an ayatollah, which it calls a unique event in Shia Islam. The referendum of the following month amended the constitution, and Article 109 now sets out the Leader's qualifications.

The second change came by force. On 28 February 2026 American and Israeli strikes killed Ali Khamenei and dozens of senior officials. Britannica records that an Israeli strike on 3 March destroyed the building where the Assembly of Experts was due to meet, delaying the choice, and that Ali Larijani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, was believed to be the country's de facto leader in the first days. Kurdistan24 reports that an interim council oversaw a brief transition, the arrangement Article 111 provides for, and on 8 March the assembly announced the election of a new Leader by what it called a unanimous vote. Larijani was killed on 17 March, and Britannica reads the appointment of his replacement as a sign that the Revolutionary Guards now outweighed the political and clerical establishment in wartime decisions; the Politics of Iran article describes the corps as having become the main power in the country during the war.

Who Iran counts as allies and adversaries

The Iran article records diplomatic relations with 165 countries and none with the United States or Israel, which Iran ceased to recognise in 1979. Iran was a founding member of the United Nations and of OPEC, joined the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in 1969, and joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS during Raisi's presidency, from 2021 to 2024. It holds observer status at the World Trade Organization.

Iran's closest partners in the region are the armed groups it calls the Axis of Resistance. Britannica lists Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi movement in Yemen, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and militias in Iraq; the axis lost the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria in December 2024. Russia, which bought Iranian drones and missiles for its war in Ukraine, and China, which signed a 25-year cooperation agreement with Iran in 2021 and was buying more than 90% of Iran's oil exports by early 2026 according to Britannica, are its main partners further away. Relations with Saudi Arabia, broken in 2016, were restored after talks that began in 2022.

The nuclear dispute has framed relations with the West since 2002. Iran's stated position is that its programme is for civilian use; the United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions from 2006, and the agreement of 2015 traded limits for relief until the United States withdrew in 2018. After the war that began in February 2026, a memorandum signed by Iran's president and the American president on 17 June set 60 days for a nuclear agreement and recorded Iran's reaffirmation that it would not seek a nuclear weapon. Iran suspended its commitments under it on 18 July, after renewed fighting over the Strait of Hormuz.