However cunning, it’s impossible to escape the fact that Khamenei is a 72-year-old leader who hasn’t left the country since 1989, presiding over a population where nearly 70 percent are under the age of 33 and connected to the world via satellite TV and Internet. Whether or not not he manages to die as supreme leader is an open question. But the gap between Khamenei and Iranian society has become unbridgeable, and only maintainable via coercion and Machiavellian power politics. Despite his vast authority, his public appearances increasingly render him less a supreme leader than a grouchy old man yelling at his youthful subjects to stay off his proverbial lawn.
