As Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian walked by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s coffin in Tehran last week, some of the black-clad mourners surrounding him chanted “Death to the compromisers” directly at him rather than paying tribute to the late leader.
Not far from there, Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s top diplomat who negotiated a cease-fire with the Trump administration and lifted some sanctions against the Islamic Republic, was forced to flee a funeral after a mob threw stones at him amidst cries of death, accusing him of being a “traitor and traitor.”
The hostility directed at government officials during the funeral reflects a theory that has been gaining momentum within the Islamic Republic’s most radical factions for months. The idea is that Iran’s wartime leaders, who negotiated and signed an agreement with Washington, are waging a soft coup against the Islamic Republic and its revolutionary ideals, while the new supreme leader is largely absent, either out of fear for his life or, as some have suggested, incompetence.
Hardliners who attended the funeral in large numbers believe that instead of avenging Khamenei’s murder, Iranian officials surrendered by signing a deal that goes against the orders of the late leader’s son and successor, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. But Khamenei remained hidden from public view, never speaking directly to the people or visibly asserting his authority even as government officials negotiated and ruled in his name.
Hard-liners accuse Iran’s visible leaders – those who run and represent the country while Khamenei remains in hiding – of consolidating power by proroguing parliament, defying negotiating orders and trying to break up nightly street rallies that have been a strong fundamentalist power base.
“Warning to Iranians: A coup is coming??” asked Mahmoud Nabavian, an outspoken radical lawmaker, X days before Khamenei’s funeral.
“In this moment of farewell to the martyred Imam (Khamenei), we raise the banner of vengeance for his blood and stand firm against the coup,” he wrote a few days later.
In Mr. Mojtaba’s absence, chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Mr. Pezeshkian, and Mr. Araghchi became the most visible faces in charge of postwar Iran. Arash Azizi, a US-based Iran expert and author of “What Iranians Want,” told CNN that hardliners who were unable to reach the new supreme leader and were dissatisfied with his performance were instead accusing him of plotting a coup.
“Mr. Mojtaba’s continued absence means that they are unable to meet with him and that Mr. Ghalibaf and his allies de facto rule the country…Thus, ultra-hardliners have accused Mr. Ghalibaf and Pezeshkian of plotting a ‘coup’ against Mojtaba,” Azizi said.
“We, the blade and your throat.”
Despite widespread calls across Iran for wartime unity, the week-long mass funeral for Khamenei, who was killed in late February in a U.S.-coordinated Israeli airstrike, was a powerful showcase for the Islamic Republic’s most hardline supporters. They used this opportunity to amplify their demands for revenge on their leaders through a new war with Washington and to declare their rejection of any agreement with Trump.
It seems their wish has now been fulfilled. A fragile ceasefire between Iran and the United States nearly collapsed this week after the Revolutionary Guards launched attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz in a bid to assert control of the waterway. This prompted retaliatory strikes by the U.S. government and renewed demands by Iranian hardliners to scrap the cease-fire agreement.
Weeks before hostilities erupted, hardliners directed their anger at the leaders who signed the deal with the United States.
“Mr. President, if the conditions of leadership are not met, it is we who will be held at knifepoint and throat,” Mohammad Ali Bakshi, a security-related “madda” or religious singer loyal to the Iranian regime, warned Pezeshkian at the ceremony. “We will bring you hell.”
The public threat to kill the president was widely criticized, but Bakshi is not known to have faced any legal repercussions.
Other officials under intense scrutiny include Mr. Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator with the United States. He is a former Revolutionary Guards commander with extensive political experience whose qualifications allowed him to step up and take command during the war, and he was widely accepted and emerged as the de facto lead operator of the regime.
“They are trying to elevate the role of the Supreme Council for National Security and diminish the role of the Supreme Leader and parliament,” hardline lawmaker Kamran Ghazanfali said in a video statement in early July, noting that the Supreme Council now decides on the country’s most sensitive wartime matters. “This is a political coup that they are planning and carrying out in stages.”
On Tuesday, Nabavian, a hard-line lawmaker who fiercely opposes the deal and is one of the leading voices warning of a “coup,” was removed from his seat on parliament’s national security committee, along with another lawmaker critical of the deal.
Nabavian, who was part of Iran’s negotiating delegation before objecting to the deal and tried to derail it by leaking the text of the agreement to the media before it was signed last month, has argued that Iran’s negotiating team is ignoring the supreme leader’s red lines in talks with the United States. CNN was unable to reach Navavian for comment.
He and others align with the views of Cebhe-e-Paidari (Endurance Front), whose hard-line members are often described by observers as “super-revolutionaries.” They see themselves as guardians of the values of the 1979 revolution that overthrew a pro-Western monarch and established an Islamic theocracy.
Experts say Iran’s visible leaders are actively trying to marginalize Iran.
“We can see Mr. Ghalibaf using his influence to exclude these hardliners,” Hamidreza Azizi, a visiting researcher at the German Institute for International Security Studies, told CNN. “They are too costly for the system, and they expose rivalries, especially as the situation in Iran becomes more volatile.”
Although their numbers are small, they hold influential positions across the country, including in parliament and on state broadcaster IRIB, which has launched its own campaign against the president.
It is unclear how much support the group has, but one of its most prominent figures, former national security secretary Saeed Jalili, came in second place in the 2024 election with more than 13 million votes. Iran’s population is approximately 93 million people.
Throughout months of war and diplomacy with Iran, President Trump has repeatedly described the Islamic Republic as a “deeply fractured” country, insisting that internal divisions are preventing any deal. But despite visible rifts between the new leader and hardliners, observers say the administration remains united around its core goal of ending the war on the condition that it achieves sanctions relief and maintains Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz.
Still, Khamenei’s continued absence, his conditional support for a cease-fire, the empowerment of the Revolutionary Guards, and the large attendance at his father’s funeral have emboldened the hardliners, who instead pursue their own aggressive policy of continuing the war with the United States and Israel.
“My proposal is to go to one of the US military bases in the region where there are hundreds, maybe thousands of American terrorists,” Manoucher Mottaki, a former Iranian foreign minister and hardliner, said in a television interview on Wednesday. “It’s enough to take 100 soldiers and bring them back to Iran.”
