A realignment of Iran’s political factions underway as elections loom

Guardian - Every so often Iran’s political factions change shape, and there are signs that a realignment is currently underway. July’s agreement with world powers, including the United States, has driven a wedge in the political class that is dominating the run-in to February’s elections for parliament and Majles-e Khobregan (‘Assembly of Experts’), the body that elects the supreme leader.

Broad support for President Hassan Rouhani’s government is not just over its foreign policy but also its desire to revive the economy and private sector. From this follows all the speculation in Tehran that principle-ists like Ali Larijani, the parliamentary speaker, and Ali Akbar Nategh-Nouri, a seasoned strategist, will help organise an electoral list for parliament broadly backing the president.

This coalition would stretch from Larijani and Nategh-Nouri, close supporters of the leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, though ‘pragmatic’ conservatives Rouhani and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, to some reformists, including Mohammad Khatami.

Hence also the nervousness of principle-ist opponents of the nuclear agreement, and their harsh criticisms of Larijani that have stretched to painting the Stars and Stripes on the road outside his office. Such refuseniks would be excluded from the broad coalition as well as more radical reformists including the ‘green movement’.

Factional politics in Iran can be bitter and complex. What can make them baffling is the absence of effective political parties. Even before the 1979 Revolution, the revolutionaries were suspicious of parties, which they associated with the left and feared could undermine a ‘unity’ focused on the charismatic leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Once velayat-e faghih (‘rule of the jurist’) was established as the structure of the Islamic Republic, factions in the 1980s coalesced around economic policy and the question of whether Iran should foment revolution abroad.

In general, Khomeini tended to back a ‘left’ that supported spreading the revolution and greater state involvement at home to create a more equal society, whereas the ‘right’ supported ‘freedom’ for private enterprise and bazaar merchants while favouring pragmatic foreign policies less likely to disrupt trade. The left also called for greater social freedoms whereas the right were socially conservative.

Many figures fitted neither camp, including Rafsanjani, war commander, parliamentary speaker and then president (1989-97), who wanted pragmatic foreign policy, greater social freedom and – at least once the Iraq war finished – a stronger private sector and a more ‘liberal’ economy. Rafsanjani’s standing and political acumen not only helped give him unrivalled influence over the course of politics (including Khamenei’s succession as leader in 1989) but led many, on both left and right, to resent his alleged opportunism.

By the 1990s, the factions realigned. Partly due to the collapse of the Soviet , the left moved away from command economics. Left-wingers also moderated their opposition to the west and – especially once Mohammad Khatami liberalised culture policies first as culture minister and after 1997 as president – put greater emphasis on social and political reforms.

In the 1980s leading left-wingers included prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, a leader today of the green movement, and Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, the leading force behind the Office for Islamic Liberation Movements and especially its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon. By the 1990s Montazeri was effectively a supporter of Khatami, who wanted not only political reform but a ‘dialogue of civilisations’, and by the time of his death in 2009 the ayatollah was seen as the spiritual leader of the green movement.

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The ‘right’ meanwhile held more closely to its positions of the 1980s. In an insightful book published in 2002, Factional Politics in Post-Khomeini Iran, Mehdi Moslem, an Iraq-born Iranian scholar, included both Larijani and Nategh-Nouri, as well as the Motalefeh party, as part of what he called the ‘traditional right’.

Moslem suggested Larijani had been a member of Motalefeh, while Nategh-Nouri may have been part of Hojjatieh, a staunchly pro-business conservative society that believed no government could be truly Islamic before the 12th Shia Imam returned as the Mahdi. Hojjatieh was apparently at polar-opposite to Khomeini’s notion of clerical rule, but once the group dissolved after Khomeini denounced it in the aftermath of the Revolution, many of its members became staunch supporters of velayat-e faghih and held leading positions in the Islamic Republic.

Since then, Nategh-Nouri has expressed the classic beliefs of the traditional right. He has frequently urged the young to resist western cultural influence, and stressed a preference for women wearing the chador rather than lighter veils. When Nategh-Nouri ran for president in 1997, discrete assurances were sent to the British (and so presumably the United States) via Larijani’s brother, Mohammad Javad, that he would be flexible in foreign policy.

When appointed minister of culture in 1992 by president Rafsanjani, Ali Larijani said his main task would be to resist a western cultural onslaught through “holy Islamic learning”, an approach he continued as head of state broadcasting from 1994 to 2004.

Nategh-Nouri led the right faction in parliament in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and when the right won the 1996 parliamentary election he became speaker with Rouhani as deputy. After Khatami became president in 1997, Nategh-Nouri opposed his cultural policies, but this did not mean he or Rouhani opposed all aspects of Khatami’s foreign policy.

Indeed, the realignment of factions into ‘reformists’ versus ‘conservatives’ over political and social reforms did not stop Rouhani leading nuclear negotiations with the European from 2003 to 2005. And while Larijani was a leading critic of the talks, his opposition was not on principle but on the grounds Iran was “swapping a candy for a pearl” – in other words, conceding too much in suspending uranium enrichment in return for Europe’s assurances over economic and trade concessions.

The presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reflected an attempt to create a new right that adopted both the assertive foreign policy and economic egalitarianism previously favoured by the left. But however successful this was electorally – and Ahmadinejad still had a 61% favourability rating in an Iran poll this August – Ahmadinejad provoked draconian international sanctions over the nuclear programme and produced an unprecedented level of bad banking debt.

Cue Rouhani’s presidential election victory in 2013. And in office Rouhani has resumed the ‘traditional right’ policies of pragmatism in foreign policy and encouragement of private enterprise, squeezed for years by sanctions and by a creeping state and quasi-state sectors. There is every reason for Larijani and Nategh-Nouri to support him, even if some mild relaxation of cultural policy or press control follows.

Of course, February’s parliamentary election will not be a clear-cut battle between one list and another. Nategh-Nouri appears involved in attempts with conservative Association of Combatant Clerics – and perhaps with Ali Akbar Velayati, another conservative strategist close to Khamenei – to create an alternative, principle-ist list. But this is usual: not only do candidates often appear on more than one list, the importance of regional and local factors increases as distance grows from the political hot house of Tehran.

And there is a further complication: the Experts’ Assembly election and the good chance its 86 members will in their next eight-year term choose a successor to the 76-year-old Khamenei. The 16-seat constituency for Tehran province may dominate media coverage, given the likely candidacy of Rafsanjani, Rouhani, Hassan Khomeini, grandson of the 1979 leader, and Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, the colourful fundamentalist cleric. But in many constituencies around the country, some with just one seat, manoeuvring will be more discrete and factions less clear.

For both assemblies, the official campaign period before polling on 26 February will be short – 14 days for Khobregan and just seven for parliament. But the attempts to shape public opinion and form alliances are well underway.

The Tehran Bureau is an independent media organisation, hosted by the Guardian. Contact us @tehranbureau