When Iran’s president speaks, the world listens for clues about the direction of the Islamic Republic. Yet the office that supposedly represents the country’s executive authority has been quietly losing power for decades.
The latest example came when Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, suggested that Tehran should avoid escalating tensions with its Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf. His remarks quickly triggered speculation about divisions within the regime’s leadership. Commentators framed the moment as another episode in the familiar drama of Iranian factional politics.
But this interpretation misunderstands the deeper transformation underway in Iran’s political system. The debate surrounding Pezeshkian does not reveal a meaningful policy struggle. Instead, it highlights a long-term institutional shift: the gradual hollowing out of the presidency. Over the past four decades, the office that once appeared to embody the country’s executive authority has been steadily stripped of real power. What remains today is less a center of decision-making than a public-facing role, a political stage on which debates are performed but rarely decided.
This transformation did not occur suddenly. It unfolded through a series of crises that progressively clarified where power in the Islamic Republic truly resides.
The first elected president of the Islamic Republic learned this lesson the hard way. Abolhassan Bani-Sadr was elected in 1980 with an overwhelming popular mandate. As an economist and revolutionary intellectual close to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, he initially believed the presidency could function as the central executive authority of the new state.
The hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran quickly proved him wrong.
By early 1981, Bani-Sadr had concluded that the continued detention of American diplomats was damaging Iran’s international position. He wanted to move toward a resolution. But the decision was not his to make. Control over the crisis lay elsewhere — in revolutionary institutions loyal directly to the supreme leader, Khomeini, and in militant networks that would soon coalesce into the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). When Bani-Sadr attempted to assert authority, he discovered how little of it he possessed. Within months, he was impeached by parliament and fled the country.
The episode established an enduring principle of the Islamic Republic: Electoral legitimacy could not override revolutionary authority.
For nearly two decades after Bani-Sadr’s impeachment, the presidency remained subordinate to the system’s clerical leadership. But during the early 1990s, when Iran was undergoing reconstruction after the decade-long war with Iraq, President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was able to accumulate significant executive prerogatives as he centralized decision-making to rehabilitate Iran’s war-damaged economy. This expansion of presidential authority, however, rested more on political necessity than on institutional change.
The election of Mohammad Khatami in 1997 briefly revived the impression that the office might regain influence. Khatami’s landslide victory reflected widespread public demand for reform, political openness and cultural liberalization. But his presidency soon exposed the structural limits of the office. Real power remained concentrated in institutions controlled by the supreme leader, above all the IRGC, the intelligence services and the judiciary. These bodies operated largely beyond the reach of the elected government.
The limits became unmistakable during the student protests of 1999. At the height of the unrest, a group of senior IRGC commanders issued an extraordinary open letter to Khatami, warning that the military might intervene if instability continued. The message was plain: The elected president could not determine the boundaries of political life.
At the same time, a series of political assassinations known as the “chain murders” targeted dissident intellectuals and activists. The killings reinforced the reality that the institutions of coercion answered not to the presidency but to the unelected core of the regime.
President Khatami’s popularity did not translate into power.
The disputed presidential election of 2009 made the hierarchy of authority even clearer.
When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of a vote widely believed to have been manipulated, millions of Iranians poured onto the streets, in what became known as the Green Movement. The protests were the largest political challenge to the Islamic Republic since the revolution itself. Yet the state’s response revealed the system’s true center of gravity.
The decisive voice was not the president’s but that of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. In a pivotal sermon days after the election, Khamenei publicly endorsed the results and warned demonstrators that the protests must end.
The IRGC and its Basij militia soon carried out a brutal crackdown. The episode exposed a reality that many Iranians had long suspected: The presidency might provide the appearance of electoral choice, but ultimate authority rested elsewhere.
Ironically, even Ahmadinejad himself, whose own election to office was rigged, would eventually come up against the boundaries of presidential power. During his second term, tensions with the supreme leader became increasingly visible. Ahmadinejad attempted to assert greater control over key government appointments and intelligence institutions. Khamenei responded by repeatedly overruling him.
In one dramatic confrontation, Ahmadinejad protested the supreme leader’s reinstatement of the intelligence minister by refusing to attend Cabinet meetings for nearly two weeks. The gesture only underscored the imbalance of power. The president could protest, but he could not prevail.
The presidency had become an office whose occupant could be publicly corrected, and occasionally humiliated, by the unelected authority above him.
Hassan Rouhani’s presidency also temporarily revived hopes that the role might still shape major policy decisions. Rouhani presented himself as a pragmatic technocrat capable of resolving Iran’s confrontation with the West. His government negotiated the 2015 nuclear agreement with the U.S. and other world powers.
Yet even this apparent diplomatic success highlighted the presidency’s dependence on the supreme leader. Rouhani’s negotiating mandate existed only because it had been authorized by Khamenei. When domestic critics — especially within the IRGC — attacked the agreement, Rouhani lacked the institutional power to defend it.
Meanwhile, the IRGC was expanding its influence far beyond the military sphere. Over the past two decades, the organization has built a vast economic empire spanning construction, telecommunications, energy infrastructure and finance. These networks have further entrenched it as the most powerful political actor in the country — one largely insulated from the authority of elected officials.
The presidency did not simply weaken during these years. Its authority migrated into institutions that were never designed to be accountable to voters. What began as a clerical republic with elected institutions has gradually evolved into a system in which the decisive levers of power increasingly lie within a military-security establishment.
Today, the office of the presidency is weaker than at any point since the revolution.
Presidents routinely complain about their inability to influence economic policy, regional strategy or the actions of powerful security institutions. Decisions increasingly emerge from networks surrounding the supreme leader and from institutions and figures that operate largely beyond the reach of the president or his Cabinet.
Seen in this light, debates surrounding President Pezeshkian should not be mistaken for signs of meaningful political pluralism. They are symptoms of a political structure in which the presidency has been steadily hollowed out.
But the erosion of the presidency may represent the first stage of a broader transformation.
For decades, the Islamic Republic functioned through a hierarchical model: Elected institutions operated below, while the supreme leader stood above them as the ultimate arbiter of authority. Over time, however, the system’s coercive institutions have accumulated increasing political and economic influence. The presidency was the first institution to feel the consequences of that shift. Its authority eroded as real decision-making migrated elsewhere.
Now, the same structural pressures may be reaching the office above it.
Iran is approaching a moment of succession in which the next supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is unlikely to command the revolutionary prestige that once sustained the position. His office in turn has increasingly become embedded within a dense network of military, security and bureaucratic power centers that did not exist in the early years of the republic.
If the presidency has gradually become a stage on which decisions made elsewhere are announced, the supreme leadership may soon face a similar fate.
The Islamic Republic was founded as a state in which clerical authority guided the political system. Four decades later, it may be evolving into something quite different: a political order in which presidents and clerics remain visible, but the real decisions are increasingly made by the institutions that command the guns.
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