Iran's Supreme Leader and Elected President

Iran has real elections. Citizens vote for a president and for the Majles, the parliament. But every elected office sits inside a cage built by unelected clerical bodies, and the Supreme Leader sits above the whole structure. He appoints the head of the judiciary, the commanders of the armed forces and the Revolutionary Guards, the heads of state broadcasting, and half the twelve members of the Guardian Council. The other half of the Guardian Council is named by the judiciary chief, whom the Supreme Leader already appointed. That council screens every candidate for president and parliament before voters ever see a ballot, and it can veto legislation it judges un-Islamic or unconstitutional. So the elected track never operates independently; it operates inside limits the unelected track sets.

The Supreme Leader himself is not directly elected. He is chosen, and can be dismissed, by the Assembly of Experts, a body of clerics who are popularly elected but who are themselves vetted for candidacy by the Guardian Council. That loop is the key mechanism: voters elect the Assembly, the Assembly picks the Supreme Leader, but the Guardian Council the Supreme Leader's own appointees shape controls who can run for the Assembly in the first place. Power circles back to where it started.

This is why the presidency is not the head of state the way Mexico's president is. Mexico's president holds both roles, head of state and head of government, in one elected office with no superior authority above it. Iran splits those roles: the president runs the daily government, but the Supreme Leader is head of state and holds final authority over the military, judiciary, and broad policy direction, so even a popular president's agenda stalls the moment the Guardian Council or the Supreme Leader objects.