The former police chief, mayor and manager likes getting his hands dirty in big projects. How will he exploit this moment in the crumbling Islamic Republic to make his next move?
In another era, Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf might have been remembered as a mayor-turned-Parliament speaker who liked big projects, inflatable budgets, and was not opposed to cracking the heads of anti-government protestors.
In the current turmoil, his knowledge of Iran’s internal security structure, business interests and leadership hierarchy lend him operational relevance in a state fighting for its survival.
Iran’s leadership is no longer governing in any conventional sense. It is absorbing assassinations, airstrikes, internal disruption, and trying to maintain continuity under pressure. In that environment, the Islamic Republic has defaulted to a familiar type: the manager who is also a commander. Ghalibaf, a former Revolutionary Guards air force chief, national police head, and long-time political operator, sits at the intersection of those roles.
Ghalibaf is reportedly becoming increasingly central in Tehran after the killing of the supreme leader and the decapitation of much of Iran’s senior command structure.
He is rumored to have replaced Ali Larijani, killed in an air strike March 17, as the Islamic Republic’s de-facto leader, and is reportedly in talks with the United States, according to Israeli news sources. Ghalibaf’s chief characteristic is ambition. He climbed the Islamic Republic’s political ladder presenting himself as a man of execution rather than ideology. He secured his role as Majles speaker during the 2019 election year, when turnout was at an all-time low due to Covid restrictions and general public disillusionment. Cementing his clout in the lower house with only 1.3 million votes, Ghalibaf immediately began appointing friends and confederates to prominent positions in parliament. One of these appointees, Mohammad Saeed Ahadian, is related by marriage to the late Ali Khamenei. Ahadian benefited from the forced takeover of the formerly reformist Khorasan newspaper, where he served as editor-in-chief for two decades.
A History of Violence
Ghalibaf’s self-image of the technocrat who gets things done played well in Tehran. But Ghalibaf’s idea of “management” has always included coercion, patronage, and control. The polished mayor in tailored suits coexisted with the security official who, by his own account, helped suppress protests in 1999 and 2009. Ghalibaf was also a vocal supporter of the hejab and chastity bill, an internationally criticized legislation which introduced harsher penalties for violations of Islamic dress code despite broad-based public opposition to hejab restrictions following the nationwide, violently suppressed Mahsa Amini protests of 2022. The Majles passed the bill in 2024, while Ghalibaf was the body’s speaker.
Ghalibaf also notoriously took credit for a series of violent acts of repression. In an audio file circulated during the 2015 presidential campaign, he described himself “beating [protesters] with wooden sticks” on the back of a motorbike during the student protests of 1999.
Elsewhere in the recording, he boasted of ordering police to fire gunshots at protesters during on-campus student demonstrations in 2003. He also commended himself for an effective response to the unrest following the disputed 2009 presidential election, which saw widespread killings and abuse of demonstrators.
Increasingly, Ghalibaf is projecting hard power publicly. In recent days, Iran has pushed the outer limits of its missile doctrine, claiming responsibility for a long-range strike toward the U.S.-U.K. base on Diego Garcia. This target was over 2,500 miles away, well beyond Iran’s previously acknowledged range. The missiles failed to hit, but that was almost beside the point. The message was received.
Ghalibaf has leaned into that message with something approaching visible enthusiasm. His public statements reject ceasefire logic outright, telling state media Iran “must strike the aggressor in the mouth,” framing escalation as both necessary and inevitable. Even before the current war, he was praising long-range missile tests as a “source of national pride” in state media reports, positioning himself rhetorically alongside the systems he now helps direct.
That instinct runs through his entire career. As mayor, Ghalibaf’s power rested not only on visible infrastructure but on invisible networks: contracts, quasi-state foundations, IRGC-linked conglomerates, and a web of associates who turned municipal spending into political capital. Crucially, those networks did not stop at Tehran’s city limits.
Investigations into his tenure describe a sprawling ecosystem of business interests tied to family members, close allies, and Revolutionary Guards-linked institutions, extending into real estate, construction, banking, and charity structures that operate with both domestic and international reach. At the center of this was his relationship with Khatam al-Anbia, the IRGC’s engineering and construction arm, which was awarded multibillion-dollar development contracts without competitive bidding. This embedded a military-economic complex into the fabric of Tehran’s urban expansion.
From there, the network radiated outward. Entities linked to Ghalibaf and his associates were involved in large-scale real estate ventures, including projects tied to pilgrimage economies in cities like Mashhad, where capital, land, and religious infrastructure intersect. Financial channels ran through institutions such as Ansar Bank, itself tied to the IRGC cooperative foundation (BTS), creating pathways for capital movement that blurred the lines between public funds, private gain, and strategic financing.
Most of Ghalibafs business network is linked to family members and friends who founded companies that benefited from contracts made possible through Ghalibaf’s various political positions. Ghalibaf’s brother-in-law, Reza Moshkir, reportedly has business ties to Algeria, Senegal, Turkey and Australia, and has been investigated for money laundering. Public business registry documents also show that Ghalibaf himself is on board of directors of three entities: Iran Association of Geopolitics, Khorasan, a private university, and Sepad Khorasan Co., a real estate development company involved in shopping malls, recreational centers and other tourism-related industries.
What makes Ghalibaf’s network particularly relevant now is not simply its scale, but its structure. It was never just about enrichment. It was about building parallel channels of procurement, logistics, and capital allocation. These systems could operate with flexibility, opacity, and resilience, including across borders where necessary.
This is what makes Ghalibaf valuable now. Iran is no longer a coherent hierarchy; it is a stressed system trying to avoid cascading failure. Ghalibaf is one of the few figures who understands how its parts fit together, and how to keep them moving when they start to break. His business networks are not separate from his political role; they are an extension of it, providing alternative routes for resources, influence, and coordination at a moment when formal channels are under strain.