Ali Larijani (left) listens to a speech by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 2009
Born in Najaf, Iraq in 1957 to a prominent Shia cleric who was close to the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Ali Larijani’s family has been influential within Iran’s political system for decades.
Some of his relatives have been the targets of corruption allegations over the years, which they denied.
A veteran of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps during the Iran-Iraq war, Larijani later headed state broadcasting IRIB for a decade from 1994 before serving as parliamentary speaker from 2008 to 2020.
In 1996, he was appointed as Khamenei’s representative to the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC). He later became secretary of the SNSC and chief nuclear negotiator, leading talks with Britain, France, Germany and Russia between 2005 and 2007.
He ran in the 2005 presidential elections, losing to populist candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with whom he later had disagreements over nuclear diplomacy. Larijani was then disqualified from running for president in both 2021 and 2024.
‘Larijani is a true insider, a canny operator, familiar with how the system operates,’ Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group’s project director for Iran, said before the Middle East war began.
