Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf

Speaker of Iran's Parliament and the country's third-ranking constitutional figure, Ghalibaf is a career IRGC officer who commanded the air force and national police before serving twelve years as Tehran's mayor. He has run for president five times since 2005 without success, most recently in 2024 when he lost to the reformist Pezeshkian. His power base is the principlist faction and IRGC institutional networks.

Ghalibaf emerged as a dominant power broker in wartime Iran, threatening irreversible destruction of Gulf Energy infrastructure, tying Strait of Hormuz access to power grid survival, and being identified as the Iranian interlocutor with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner while publicly denying any negotiations. He led Iran's delegation at the first formal US-Iran negotiating session since 1979, held in proximity format at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad in April 2026. He publicly listed three Ceasefire violations before those talks opened: Israel's continued strikes on Lebanon, a drone incursion into Iranian airspace, and the US refusal to accept Iran's enrichment rights. The Parliament speaker functions simultaneously as Iran's hardline public voice and its chief diplomat, giving Tehran deniability on both tracks.

By mid-May 2026, Ghalibaf sharpened his dual role into a more explicit geopolitical frame. On 17 May, he declared in a speech that the world is 'at the cusp of a new world order led by the Global South', quoting Xi Jinping and framing Iran's resistance as a historical inflection point for the non-Western bloc. Earlier in May he coined the phrase 'Operation Trust Me Bro' to dismiss the US MOU transmitted through Pakistan, a label that stuck across international media and framed Tehran's rejection of the 14-point document as a principled refusal of unverifiable US commitments.

Ghalibaf signed the Islamabad MOU for Iran on 15 June 2026 in a digital ceremony alongside JD Vance: the first Iran instrument either side has signed in 108 days of war. The signature drew immediate hardline challenge inside the Majlis: around 60 MPs signed a letter demanding he justify it, with Sabeti of the Paydari faction saying the deal 'violates the Supreme Leader's red lines'. That Ghalibaf absorbed the backlash without retracting the signature was the clearest public evidence of the Khamenei succession bloc's preference for a deal over a continued exchange.

At the Switzerland round (21-24 June), Ghalibaf led Iran's delegation alongside Foreign Minister Araghchi. He refused the group photograph and gave no joint press conference after Trump posted social media threats on 21 June . On 22 June, he publicly confirmed agreement to release $12 billion in frozen Iranian assets, narrowing the figure from an unverified Mehr News draft of $24 billion. The Switzerland session produced a Qatar-Pakistan joint communique announcing a 60-day roadmap toward a final deal and a High-Level Committee for political oversight; no US-Iran joint statement was issued and Iran signed nothing on the communique itself.

The Speaker's procedural authority remains the mechanism through which any deal either survives or dies in Parliament. Ghalibaf controls the Majlis committee calendar; the 290-seat chamber voted 221-0 to suspend IAEA cooperation and a €50 million Trump bounty bill remains under committee review. If his pro-deal posture holds, he can clear the ratification PATH. His refusal of the group photograph at Geneva is the same dual-channel behaviour he deployed across the whole arc: sign the instrument, deny the symbolism.

On 7 July, after CENTCOM struck more than 80 Iranian targets and Washington revoked the Iranian oil waiver, Ghalibaf called both actions 'major violations' of the 18 June memorandum, placing the financial instrument alongside the kinetic one in Tehran's formal complaint. Trump had called the same agreement 'over' hours earlier while adding that negotiations would continue; with neither side having formally withdrawn from the memorandum, Ghalibaf as chief negotiator is now managing its decay rather than its signature.