Oh GOOD!  Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Son Emerges as Leading Choice to Be His Successor

The senior clerics responsible for selecting Iran’s next supreme leader met on Tuesday to deliberate, and the son of the slain former leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, emerged as the clear front-runner, according to three Iranian officials familiar with the deliberations.

The officials said that the clerics were considering announcing that the son, Mojtaba Khamenei, would be his father’s successor as early as Wednesday morning but that some had expressed reservations, fearing that it could expose him as a target for the United States and Israel.

The clerics, known as the Assembly of Experts, held two virtual meetings one in the morning and one in the evening, according to the officials. Israel struck a building in Qum, one of Shia Islam’s main seats of power, where the assembly was scheduled to meet and elect the new supreme leader, but the building was empty, according to the Fars News agency, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Vali Nasr, an expert of Iran and Shia Islam at Johns Hopkins University, said that Mr. Khamenei would be a surprising choice — and a potentially telling one. “He was slated to become the successor for a long time,” Mr. Nasr said, “but for the past two years, it seemed to have dropped off from the radar. If he is elected, it suggests it is a much more hard-line Revolutionary Guard side of the regime that is now in charge.” Mr. Khamenei is known for having close ties to the Revolutionary Guards.

Mehdi Rahmati, an analyst in Tehran, said supporters of the government would see him as a continuation of a ruler whom they view as martyred and will back him swiftly, and that government opponents, too, will see him as a continuation of the regime, which in recent months has killed at least seven thousand protesters,

Abdolreza Davari, a politician close to Mojtaba Khamenei, said in public statements and in interviews with The New York Times that if Mr. Khamenei did succeed his father, he could emerge as a figure in the style of the Saudi Arabian leader Mohammed bin Salman: “He is extremely progressive and will move to sideline the hard-liners,” Mr. Davari said in a text message before the war. “See his appointment as a shedding of skin.”