Iran's polls set to split divided conservatives in two

TEHRAN: A presidential election in Iran next month could provide the final straw to split an already long-divided conservative political camp, after years of growing divisions.

While the list of approved candidates has yet to be released, the June 18 poll is already widely expected to be a showdown between conservative Ali Larijani, a former parliament speaker, and ultraconservative judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi.

According to the elections committee, close to 600 hopefuls -- including 40 women -- have registered to be candidates to succeed moderate President Hassan Rouhani, who is constitutionally barred from running for a third consecutive term.

But only a handful will be allowed to run after vetting by the Guardian Council, a conservative-dominated, unelected body in charge of overseeing elections.

The first fractures within the conservatives date back to the "Green Movement", which emerged in 2009 during protests against the disputed re-election of populist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But it was the 2015 nuclear deal in Vienna that deepened the cracks.

Left and right

In Iran, the word "conservatives" -- "mohafezekaran" in Persian -- is rarely used, a term that appeared in media only in 1997.

Until then, only the "right" and the "left" were known within the "Followers of the Line of the Imam", the supporters of the Islamic republic's late founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The other forces -- from Marxists to liberals and nationalists -- who took part in the 1979 revolution that toppled the shah were ejected.

The essential ideological difference was economic; the left favoured interventionism, the right less state control.

After 1989, with the end of the Iran-Iraq war and Khomeini's death, the right dominated political life.

'Principalists'

The right regrouped to slowly gather strength.

"The right, which suffered from a bitter failure in the elections, gradually rebuilt itself," said historian Jafar Shiralinia, author of several books on contemporary Iran.

The movement won over young faces of the movement -- who dubbed themselves "ossoulgara", or "principalists" -- to set them apart from their rivals, the "reformers".

"They consider themselves to be followers of the principles of the 1979 revolution," said journalist Farshad Ghorbanpour.

"It implies that the other current, the reformers, had deviated from the values defended by the revolution."

Among the then critics of Khatami's government was the young head of state television -- Ali Larijani.