After months of on-and-off talks, Iran and the United States are set to end their war and sign an interim peace agreement on Friday June 19 in Switzerland. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi led most of the negotiations, but no Iranian politician has benefited more from the talks than Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Majles (Iran’s parliament), who was officially the head of Iran’s negotiation team. His meteoric rise comes after a controversial career — one in which Ghalibaf has drifted in and out of favor with both Iran’s leadership and people.
In 1961, Ghalibaf was born to a religious family in Torghabeh, not far from the sacred city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran. He received a master’s degree from the University of Tehran (UT) and a Ph.D. from Tarbiat-e Modarres University, both in political geography. He is an associate professor at UT and teaches the same subject there. He has also published three books. But the most important aspect of Ghalibaf’s record is his military-political work. Ghalibaf first joined the Basij militia, a paramilitary force and one of the five main branches of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), after the 1979 Revolution. When Kurdish forces tried to take over Iran’s Kurdistan Province in the first months after the revolution, Ghalibaf took part in defeating their forces. After Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, Ghalibaf was transferred to the IRGC and fought in the southern front of the war. He was rapidly promoted, first taking the command of a brigade, and then leading the 5th Nasr Division as well as the 25th Karbala Division, two of the IRGC’s most important fighting forces during the war with Iraq. After the war ended in 1988, Ghalibaf was commissioned as a brigadier general and appointed the commander of the Najaf Command Center in western Iran, and then deputy commander of the Basij militia. From 1994 to 1997, Ghalibaf served as commander of Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters , the operational headquarters of the IRGC that also coordinates its operations with the regular armed forces. He is a certified pilot of Airbus aircrafts, having received training in France, and from 1997 to 2000 he was promoted to commander of the IRGC air force. When the university uprising of July 1999 began at the University of Tehran and quickly spread to other universities, Ghalibaf helped put it down. In addition, after the uprising ended, Ghalibaf wrote a letter signed by 24 other senior IRGC commanders to then-president Mohammad Khatami, warning him that if he did not end the pursuit of his reformist policies, they would be forced to take strong action. That letter established the IRGC as a powerful force to be reckoned with in Iran, which appears to have become even more powerful today.
In 2001, Ghalibaf became commander of the national police, and his forces took part in confronting renewed large-scale demonstrations by university students in Tehran in 2003 , during which he even threatened to kill the protesters. The national police under his command summoned several dozen journalists, intellectuals, and dissidents and interrogated and even imprisoned them. Among them was Siamak Pourmand, a prominent film critic who was imprisoned and then lived under house arrest until committing suicide in 2011.
Ghalibaf retired from the military in 2005 and was elected Tehran’s mayor for four terms, from 2005 to 2017. He ran multiple times in the presidential elections but failed. He also ran in the elections for the Majles in 2020 and was elected and then re-elected in 2024. He has been accused in multiple cases of corruption and nepotism, particularly when he was Tehran’s mayor, and even in the Majles. Ghalibaf has always tried to present himself as a pragmatist, even though he has long been close to the Osoolgarayan , Iran’s traditional conservatives. For a while, he even referred to himself as a technocrat. As Tehran’s mayor, he developed and carried out several large projects to improve Tehran as a huge metropolitan area. But in 2013, after the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei attacked technocrats by name, he stopped using the term. The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran paved Ghalibaf’s path to the heights of Iran’s leadership. When Israel assassinated Ali Larijani, secretary-general of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), Ghalibaf ran the SNSC unofficially until Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr , a retired IRGC brigadier general and an ultra-hardliner, was appointed to the post. Ghalibaf was then appointed as the head of Iran’s team for negotiating with the United States. The question is why, given his controversial background? The answer is multifold.
One reason is that, given Ghalibaf’s diverse military, academic, and political background, he represents a compromise between Iranian political factions for leading the negotiations. Ghalibaf was also close to Major General Qassem Soleimani (posthumously promoted to lieutenant general), Iran’s top military strategist who the United States assassinated in 2020, which also gives him credibility in the eyes of hardline senior IRGC officers. Araghchi is a skilled diplomat and is trusted by Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader, but he does not have Ghalibaf’s deep connections with the IRGC. Reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian, for his part, has strong moral weight and democratic legitimacy, and his popularity has been on the rise, giving the negotiations political cover. Pezeshkian and his reformist allies have directly and indirectly lent support to Ghalibaf, who they view as a counterweight to the most hardline elements represented by the Jebhe Paydari Iran-e Eslami [Islamic Iran Stability Front - IISF], who oppose any negotiations with the United States. In the time since he was appointed as the lead negotiator, Ghalibaf has become the main target of the IISF, which has never forgiven him for not supporting former hardline nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili in the 2023 presidential elections.
The second reason is that Ghalibaf has the support of the more pragmatic faction of IRGC officers who are less ideological and more worried about Iran’s domestic problems. The people’s demands for an improved economy, the elimination of corruption, and political and social freedom persist. Even if all the issues with the United States are resolved, the domestic problems must still be addressed, and Ghalibaf appears to recognize this fact.
The third reason is that Ghalibaf has always had a close relationship with the Beit-e Rahbari (the Abode of the Supreme Leader), the center of power in Iran. When he ran in the 2005 presidential elections, it was widely believed that he did so with the support of the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei until it was discovered that he might have been involved in illegal activities whose nature remains unclear, as was hinted at by former President Hassan Rouhani during a 2017 presidential debate.
The IISF’s standing, meanwhile, is on a steep decline due to its opposition to expanding political and social freedoms, unblocking the internet, and negotiations with the United States. Iran’s traditional conservatives, as well as the reformists and other moderate groups, hope that Ghalibaf will expedite the IISF’s demise by isolating them and ending their hold on the financial institutions of the nation.
Post-war Iran will not be the same nation as it was four months ago. It is quite possible that Ghalibaf is finally on track to win the presidency. But can he create tectonic shifts that Iran’s political structure badly needs, and address people’s legitimate aspirations and demands? Given his authoritarian streak, I doubt it. But as someone who has always supported reforms over revolution, I will be more than happy to be surprised.