Two unusual incidents within a day of each other have exposed how deeply contested Tehran’s memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Washington has become inside Iran’s own establishment, just months into Mojtaba Khamenei's tenure as supreme leader.
The first challenge came from the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body that oversees the supreme leader. Sixty-three of its 88 members issued a statement on June 29 urging negotiators to hold firm to the "red lines" set by Khamenei. While addressed to the “people of Iran,” the text read more like a direct warning to the negotiating team.
Hours later, the assembly's secretariat scrambled to clarify that the statement did not represent the body's official position, branding it “unusual and unconventional.”
Meanwhile, a day later, state broadcaster IRIB abruptly cut a pre-recorded interview with parliament speaker and lead negotiator Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf mid-answer, right as he was addressing the unfreezing of Iranian assets under the MOU.
The parliament's media office noted the tape had been delivered more than two hours before airtime with no prior coordination sought regarding the cut. The incident instantly fueled speculation that senior executives at IRIB oppose the deal with the United States and are actively seeking to undermine the negotiating team.
Analysts who track Iran's internal factional balance say the two episodes, while different in form, reflect the same underlying reality: With the personal authority of the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei no longer available to enforce discipline, domestic institutions are testing how much room they have to shape the narrative.
"We can read two different messages out of this," Babak Dorbeiki, a UK-based political analyst, told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda regarding the assembly statement.
Externally, Dorbeiki said, the pressure serves Mojtaba Khamenei well; rising through a security-brokered succession without an independent power base of his own, it allows him to signal to Washington that his hands are tied, while the statement's unofficial form protects his own room to maneuver. Internally, it signals a sharpening factional competition.
"It's practically the voice of the whole institution," Dorbeiki said of the 63 signatures, suggesting the unofficial rollout may have been deliberate, since a formal institutional statement that blunt would never have cleared the secretariat mid-negotiation.
He framed the deeper contest as a battle between an ideological, security-aligned current in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) that until recently enjoyed outsized influence, and a more pragmatic, realist wing of the establishment now gaining ground.
Hard-liners have been scrutinizing the agreement with the United States, which has in turn been watching how Iranian officials are reacting to it.
They insist Iran should not have negotiated at all and accuse Iranian negotiators of erasing whatever gains were made after the United States and Israel launched a bombing campaign against the Islamic republic on February 28.
More moderate voices, including many conservatives, reject that framing, arguing that the MOU benefits Iran considerably more than it profits the United States.
A central question, according to France-based commentator Reza Alijani, is whether the new supreme leader will fully back his negotiators or, like his father, attempt to keep all factions satisfied.
Alijani noted that while the younger Khamenei's earliest statements after his ascension were dense with self-effacing language, more recent remarks show him asserting that he personally "allowed" the team to negotiate.
Given Khamenei’s relative youth at 56, Alijani argued it will take time for him to command the absolute authority his father once wielded.
Until then, the new leader is likely to preserve his father's conditional, two-track approach to the West: authorizing talks while working to keep hard-line elements anchored inside the system rather than alienated from it.
Ultimately, the fight over the US-Iran deal has ceased to be a simple contest between reformists and hard-liners. Instead, it has become a high-stakes test of just how much independent latitude Iran's institutions -- clerical, military, and media alike -- believe they can now exercise in the absence of a single, undisputed center of authority.
