Demographics

Factions

Election results

Presidential elections

Parliament

Parties and organizations

Alliances

Media

See also

References

1. ^Mohseni, Payam (2016). "Factionalism, Privatization, and the Political economy of regime transformation". In Brumberg, Daniel; Farhi, Farideh (eds.).Power and Change in Iran: Politics of Contention and Conciliation. Indiana Series in Middle East Studies. Indiana University Press. p. 47.ISBN 978-0253020680.
2. ^^abSaid Amir Arjomand; Nathan J. Brown (2013).The Rule of Law, Islam, and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran. SUNY Press. p. 150.ISBN 978-1-4384-4597-7.'Conservative' is no longer a preferred term in Iranian political discourse. 'Usulgara', which can be clumsily translated as 'principlist', is the term now used to refer to an array of forces that previously identified themselves as conservative, fundamentalist, neo-fundamentalist, or traditionalist. It developed to counter the termeshlahgara, or reformist, and is applied to a camp of not necessarily congruous groups and individuals.
3. ^^abcRandjbar-Daemi, Siavush (2012)."Glossary of the most commonly-used Persian terms and abbreviations".Intra-State Relations in the Islamic Republic of Iran: The Presidency and the Struggle for Political Authority, 1989–2009 (Ph.D. thesis). Martin, Vanessa (Supervisor).Royal Holloway, University of London. p. 11. Open access material licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
4. ^^ab"Threading the Needle: How President Pezeshkian Could Reshape Iranian Politics".Harvard International Review. 30 December 2024. Retrieved10 January 2026.His election to the presidency solidified the rule of the Principlist faction of the Iranian parliament, a far-right, conservative coalition that aligns with the hardline positions of Khamenei and supports the original ideological tenets of the 1979 revolution.
5. ^^ab"Iran's political shake-up and Ebrahim Raisi as president".Responsible Statecraft. 23 August 2021. Retrieved10 January 2026.
6. ^^[2][3][4][5]
7. ^Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi (2013), "Women's Rights, Shari'a Law, and the Secularization of Islam in Iran",International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society,26 (3), New York:237–253,doi:10.1007/s10767-013-9143-x,S2CID 145213603,'Principlism' or osul-gera'i first appeared in the Iranian political lexicon during the second-term presidency ofMohammad Khatami as an alternative to eslāh-talabi or reformism. Although principlists do not share a uniform political platform, they all believed that the reformist movement would lead the Republic towards secularism. One of the most common elements of their political philosophy is the comprehensiveness of the shari'a. The responsibility of the Islamic state is to determine ways of implementing the mandates of Islam, rather than the reformist project of reinterpreting the shari'a to correspond to the demands of contemporary society.
8. ^^abMehdi Mozaffari (2007),"What is Islamism? History and Definition of a Concept"(PDF),Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions,8 (1):17–33,doi:10.1080/14690760601121622,S2CID 9926518,In fact, Iranian 'Islamists' of our day call themselves 'Usul gara', which literally means 'fundamentalist', but in a positive sense. It designates a 'person of principles' who is the 'true Muslim'.
9. ^^[7][8]
10. ^^abcdSherrill, Clifton (2011). "After Khamenei: Who Will Succeed Iran's Supreme Leader?".Orbis.55 (4):631–47.doi:10.1016/j.orbis.2011.07.002.
11. ^^abBarbara Ann Rieffer-Flanagan, ed. (March 22, 2013).Evolving Iran: An Introduction to Politics and Problems in the Islamic Republic. Georgetown University Press. p. 69.On the political spectrum neoconservatives, also sometimes referred to as hard-line conservatives or principlists, are on the far right. Reformists, sometimes called the Islamic left, are the furthest away from the neoconservatives, with pragmatic conservatives falling somewhere in between the two.
12. ^^[10][11]
13. ^^abcMelody Mohebi (2014),The Formation of Civil Society in Modern Iran: Public Intellectuals and the State, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 129–131,ISBN 978-1-137-40110-6
14. ^^abRobert J. Reardon (2012),Containing Iran: Strategies for Addressing the Iranian Nuclear Challenge, RAND Corporation, pp. 81–82,ISBN 978-0833076373
15. ^^[13][14]
16. ^Tait, Robert (18 August 2010)."Iranian President's New 'Religious-Nationalism' Alienates Hard-Line Constituency".Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
17. ^Matthias Maass, ed. (November 7, 2017).The World Views of the Obama Era: From Hope to Disillusionment.Springer International Publishing. p. 199.ISBN 978-3-319-61076-4.Hardline conservatives or principlists occupy the far right of the Iranian political spectrum. When it comes to foreign policy, hardline conservatives often articulate an anti-Western and anti-American perspective.
18. ^"U.S. Must Be Wary as Iran's Parliament Veers Hard Right".Critical Threats Project. 26 February 2020. Retrieved10 January 2026.Principlists' victory in the parliamentary elections last Friday is part of a larger shift in Iran's political environment toward the far-right conservative camp.
19. ^"Iran's Moderate Conservatives Might Make A Comeback In 2024".Iran International. 3 April 2022. Retrieved10 January 2026.Meanwhile, even among the conservatives, there are many voters who would welcome the Larijani-led right-of-center faction to replace the far right "principlists" who currently control the Majles.
20. ^^{[4][5][11][17][18][19]}
21. ^"Freedom in the World: Iran",Freedom House, 2017, archived fromthe original on 17 May 2017, retrieved25 May 2017
22. ^Mehdi Moslem (2002),Factional Politics in Post-Khomeini Iran, Syracuse University Press, p. 135,ISBN 9780815629788
23. ^Axworthy, Michael (2016),Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic, Oxford University Press, p. 430,ISBN 9780190468965
24. ^Kevan Harris (2017).A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran. Univ of California Press. p. 157.ISBN 9780520280816.This discourse was eventually tagged with the Persian neologism osulgarāi, a word that can be translated into English as 'fundamentalist', since 'osul' means 'doctrine', 'root', or 'tenet'. According to several Iranian journalists, state-funded media were aware of the negative connotation of this particular word in Western countries. Preferring not to be lumped in with Sunni Salafism, the English-language media in Iran opted to use the term 'principlist', which caught on more generally.
25. ^Haddad Adel, Gholamali; Elmi, Mohammad Jafar; Taromi-Rad, Hassan (2012-08-31). "Jāme'e-ye Rowhāniyyat-e Mobārez".Political Parties: Selected Entries from Encyclopaedia of the World of Islam. EWI Press. p. 108.ISBN 9781908433022.
26. ^Robin B. Wright, ed. (2010),The Iran Primer: Power, Politics, and U.S. Policy, US Institute of Peace Press, p. 37,ISBN 978-1601270849
27. ^Masoud Kazemzadeh (2008), "Intra-Elite Factionalism and the 2004 Majles Elections in Iran",Middle Eastern Studies,44 (2):189–214,doi:10.1080/00263200701874867,S2CID 144111986,In Western sources, the term 'hard-liners' is used to refer to the faction under the leadership of Supreme Leader Ali Khamanehi. Members of this group prefer to call themselvesOsul-gara. The wordosul (plural ofasl) means 'fundamentals', or 'principles' or 'tenets', and the verbal suffix-gara means 'those who uphold or promote'. The more radical elements in the hard-line camp prefer to call themselvesOmmat Hezbollah.Ommat is a technical Arabic-Islamic term referring to people who are Muslim.Hezbollah literally means 'Party of Allah'. Before the rise of Ahmadinejad to the presidency in 2005, many official sources in the Islamic Republic referred to this group asmohafezeh-kar ('conservative'). Between 1997 and 2006, many Iranians inside Iran used the termseqtedar-gara ('authoritarian') andtamamiyat-khah ('totalitarian') for what many Western observers have termed 'hard-liners'. Members of the reformist faction of the fundamentalist oligarchy called the hard-linerseqtedar-gara.
28. ^Etel Solingen, ed. (2012),Sanctions, Statecraft, and Nuclear Proliferation, Cambridge University Press, p. 222,ISBN 9781107010444
29. ^"Poll Results of Popular Leaning Towards Principlists and Reformists",Iranian Students Polling Agency (ISPA) (in Persian), 28 April 2017, retrieved1 June 2017 – via Khabaronline
30. ^"Disappointed in Rouhani, Iranians Seek a Different Sort of Leader in June Elections".Chicago Council on Global Affairs. 9 April 2021. Archived fromthe original on 7 November 2024.According to other IranPoll results, the support base for the reformists has shrunk by about 8 percentage points since 2017, while the support base for the conservatives has grown by 4 percentage points. Still, more Iranians self-identify as a reformist (21%) or leaning reformist (10%) than identify as a "principlist" (19%) or leaning principlist (7%). Four in 10 (43%) have no preference.
31. ^Thaler; et al. (2010).Mullahs, Guards, and Bonyads: An Exploration of Iranian Leadership Dynamics. Sacramento, CA:RAND Corporation.ISBN 978-0-8330-4773-1.

External links