In the weeks since the United States and Iran signed a preliminary agreement on June 17 to halt their hostilities, an organised political force inside Iran has openly opposed the deal. Mahmoud Nabavian, deputy chair of the Iranian parliament’s National Security Commission, has warned that the agreement risks turning Iran into “a colony of the United States”.
Iranian MP Kamran Ghazanfari has dismissed the government’s official line that Iran prevailed in the war and pushed the United States into retreat as a “blatant lie”. He has also accused the parliament speaker and chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, of deliberately keeping parliament closed to shield the administration and its negotiators from criticism.
Meysam Nili, the brother-in-law of the late former conservative president Ebrahim Raisi, went further, calling the agreement a “catastrophic capitulation”. All three belong to what Western coverage describes as Iran’s “hardline” faction.
The hardliner label is generally used for politicians, clerics or military officers who defend the religious and anti-Western foundations of the 1979 revolution, resist social liberalisation, and reject diplomatic alignment with the West. There is, however, no single Iranian hardline position, and treating the term as shorthand for ideological rigidity ends up obscuring more than it clarifies.
The current factional alignment took shape in 1996 and 1997, with the election of the reformist president Mohammad Khatami. From that point, the question of relations with the United States moved decisively to the centre, and every subsequent faction came to be defined as much by its position on that question as by domestic policy. The result is a political landscape that does not map cleanly onto Western reformist or moderate binaries.
Many factions, one label
Iran’s hardline current is a loose alignment of several constituencies. These include the Paydari Front in parliament, of which Nabavian and Ghazanfari are members, as well as sections of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the economic conglomerates linked to it. Other groups include the Friday prayer establishment of state-appointed clerics, the security and judicial apparatus, and political circles around Saeed Jalili, the Paydari Front’s most prominent figure.
Each group carries distinct economic and political interests alongside its revolutionary commitments. These interests are particularly visible in the smuggling routes, currency arbitrage and informal trade networks that have flourished while Iran has been cut off from global financial systems. The IRGC’s commercial conglomerates, including its construction and engineering arm Khatam al-Anbiya, have absorbed a substantial share of state contracting. The bonyads, large semi-public foundations created after the 1979 revolution from the assets of the deposed monarchy, control an estimated 20 to 40 per cent of Iran’s GDP and are aligned with senior clerics. The Paydari Front’s parliamentary base draws on networks of small traders and bazaaris exposed to the cost of sanctions relief, and individual figures within the broader coalition have personal stakes in the parallel economy and in the financial channels linking Iran to China, the UAE and Turkey.
Hardliners have generally maintained the belief that Iran should develop a nuclear deterrent and engage directly with Washington. Paydari parliamentarians have at times pressed for confrontational positions, including votes to escalate uranium enrichment and suspend cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which IRGC commercial circles have privately resisted due to their exposure to the costs of disruption.
Hardliners have also been flexible on foreign and domestic policy. Iran’s rapprochement with Saudi Arabia in 2023, brokered by Beijing, restored diplomatic relations after seven years of severed ties and proxy confrontation. The deal was endorsed and implemented by the Raisi government, despite longstanding ideological hostility to a Sunni monarchy aligned with Washington, once IRGC commanders calculated that regional deescalation served their interests better than continued confrontation in Yemen and the Gulf.
Social policy is where the hardliners are most openly divided. In December 2022, after the Mahsa Amini protests, the morality police was reportedly disbanded and then quietly reconstituted. In April 2024, the judiciary launched the Noor (Light) Plan, intensifying enforcement through cameras, automatic fines, vehicle confiscation and business closures targeting women without hijab. The plan has not been withdrawn. Through 2025 and into 2026, however, its implementation has been visibly uneven: Tehran cracks down for weeks, then eases; provincial cities apply the plan inconsistently; local prosecutors give businesses contradictory instructions. IRGC commanders speak on both sides of the question, and the judiciary is openly divided. What looks from a distance like retreat is, on closer inspection, factional contestation playing out as inconsistent enforcement. The hardline coalition can no longer impose a unified policy on the most ideologically charged domain of politics after the revolution.
Beyond the binary
Within the coalition, three distinct currents have become visible since the MoU, distinguished principally by their position on relations with the United States.
The first is the reformist or pro-western current associated with President Pezeshkian and the surviving figures of the Rouhani administration. It believes that normalisation with Washington remains possible, that regional deescalation should be pursued, and that the economic development model promised in the 1990s can still be delivered. Its leading intellectual figure is the former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, whose April 2026 Foreign Affairs article is widely regarded as the analytical basis of the MoU. Zarif belongs to a diplomatic generation shaped in the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of unipolar US dominance made engagement appear inevitable. Critics inside Iran argue that this generation has not adapted its assumptions to the multipolar shift since 2015 or to the visible decline of American hegemony.
The second is the pragmatist current around Ghalibaf and parts of the IRGC’s commercial leadership. A former commander of the IRGC Air Force, Ghalibaf is a contested figure. As Tehran’s mayor between 2005 and 2017, he was criticised for corruption but is credited inside the IRGC with directing substantial municipal resources into the Guards’ aerospace and missile programmes. He is trusted by the state elite and by IRGC commanders, but has never won a popular election: he lost the 2005 presidential race to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the 2024 race that followed Raisi’s death in a helicopter accident to Pezeshkian, who took roughly 10 million votes against Jalili’s 9 million and Ghalibaf’s 3 million. After that election, Ghalibaf and Pezeshkian fused their parliamentary blocs into a centrist coalition known as Vaka, which now provides the governing majority and the negotiating team behind the MoU.
The third is the revolutionary current, associated with Jalili, parts of the IRGC senior command, sections of the Friday prayer establishment, and the nightly street mobilisations that began with the strikes that killed Khamenei. Jalili served as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator and Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNC) under Ahmadinejad between 2007 and 2013, ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2013, 2021 and 2024, and is consistently more trusted than Ghalibaf by the conservative popular base. The current’s core critique of the MoU is twofold. First, it argues that Iran failed to impose sufficient costs on the United States to re-establish credible deterrence. Second, it contends that the negotiating team squandered a rare moment of national unity by making concessions after the ceasefire instead of using that unity to negotiate from a stronger position. The voices that opened this article all reflect this current of thought.
The IRGC itself is not aligned with any single one of these three. The Guards are a nearly 200,000-strong organisation that includes a substantial commercial conglomerate, with tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure investments, much of which was directly threatened by US strikes during the war. The senior command contains both figures from modest Mostazafin backgrounds, the rural and urban poor whom the revolution claimed to represent, who have remained close to the revolutionary current, and figures whose family interests have intersected with the oligarchic networks profiting from the parallel economy. This internal heterogeneity is part of why the Guards’ apparent unity behind the MoU should not be read as ideological conversion.
Engineering the impasse
These mechanisms have largely been the work of what is now becoming the coalition’s revolutionary current. Where the hardline current has been most successful is not in writing policy but in making any alternative politically too expensive to defend. After the 2015 deal, the Guardian Council blocked ratification of two Financial Action Task Force conventions, ensuring international banks would not process Iranian transactions even after sanctions were lifted and depriving the JCPOA of the relief Rouhani had promised. In late 2020, the Majles passed a Strategic Action Plan that legally required uranium enrichment to rise and IAEA inspections to be curtailed, turning escalation into law and stripping negotiators of any room for concession.
The killing of Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, in a US drone strike at Baghdad airport on 3 January 2020 worked in the same way. Soleimani had coordinated Iran’s network of allied militias across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, known as the axis of resistance. A Majles resolution declared US military personnel terrorists, demands followed to suspend cooperation with nuclear monitors, and Friday prayer pulpits framed any dialogue with Washington as a betrayal of his memory. Rouhani’s team could not defend engagement without being attacked as traitors.
The hardliners also contributed to the breakdown of the indirect channels through Oman and Qatar in 2024 and 2025. Kayhan, the daily aligned with the Supreme Leader’s office, ran sustained editorials accusing the negotiating team of treason; outlets linked to the IRGC such as Javan amplified the line. The judiciary opened espionage investigations into advisers around the talks and detained dual nationals at moments timed to disrupt sensitive rounds. Hardline parliamentarians tabled preconditions designed to be impossible for Washington to accept publicly. Under sustained external pressure, the hardline current does not need to win the argument inside the regime; it needs only to make any other course politically prohibitive.
A tactical pause, not a shift
Something appears to have shifted. The SNC approved the MoU before it was authorised by the Supreme Leader, by a majority well above the three-quarters threshold required, with some reports suggesting all but one member voted in favour, the dissenter widely believed to have been Jalili. Four military personnel who do not normally have voting rights requested permission to vote and were granted it, all in favour.
The parliamentary picture has shifted alongside the security one. In early June, Ghalibaf, who has led the negotiations under the new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, secured 235 votes to extend his speakership; the Paydari-backed challenger took 29. The vote reflects the consolidation of the Vaka coalition that emerged from the 2024 election, leaving Paydari and Jalili in a parliamentary minority even as they retain institutional weight outside the Majles.
Mojtaba Khamenei’s own position has been ambiguous. A public letter using the phrase Asl al-Usul (a foundational principle) expressed reservations about the agreement while permitting the negotiating team to proceed. He positioned himself alongside the street demonstrations demanding no concessions on Lebanon, framing the question as a revolution against the Nezam, the institutional state, rather than as acceptance or rejection of the deal. The new Supreme Leader has not yet consolidated his authority; the country remains plastic, with no single figure commanding the last word.
The IRGC’s support is best understood as calculated patience. Senior commanders have publicly stated that they do not expect Trump’s concessions to be fully delivered and that the agreement is most likely a tactical pause. The proof they cite is the difference between Iran’s performance in the brief twelve-day war of July 2025 and the forty-day war that followed: the second engagement showed markedly improved performance, which the Guards attribute to the intervening period being used for re-equipping and training. Material self-interest reinforces the calculation. The infrastructure targeted during the war, including energy installations and missile production facilities, was either directly owned by the IRGC’s commercial conglomerates or contracted out to them; a renewed war within months would destroy capital the Guards have spent decades building, while the MoU provides time to consolidate, repair and disperse those assets.
For most of the last decade, the broader establishment: the Supreme Leader’s office, which has operated since 1989 as a parallel executive with a large budget and limited transparency, together with the Guardian Council, the senior IRGC command and the judiciary: had underwritten Paydari obstruction, treating closed diplomatic openings, international isolation, and damaged credibility as a price worth paying for revolutionary coherence. After the war, the cost rose sharply, and those institutions began to withdraw their protection. The IRGC’s role as principal architect of Iran’s external position has become more visible than at any time since the revolution, and the balance of power appears to be shifting from clerical authority to the military.
That shift is not uncontested. The institutional cover has been withdrawn from above, but Paydari’s social base: small traders, bazaaris, religious-conservative populations and war-generation veterans, mobilised through the Friday-prayer establishment and the nightly street demonstrations, remains intact, and cannot be dissolved by the same instruments that once protected it. The revolutionary current has rejected the negotiating posture underpinning the MoU, and whether the pragmatist coalition can hold the institutional line against a constituency it can no longer protect but also cannot eliminate remains an open question.
Conclusion
The “hardliner” label has served as useful shorthand, but it has obscured what is actually contested within the Iranian state.
The shift now underway is real but contested. The SNC, the IRGC’s pragmatist wing, the parliamentary majority, and the Beit-e Rahbari have moved behind the MoU. Whether the pragmatist coalition holds depends on whether the MoU delivers visible economic relief and on whether Washington and Tel Aviv respect its terms, neither of which is assured.
Iran’s factional politics cannot be understood through the categories Western coverage typically applies. The hardliner label flattens what is, in fact, a contested political economy, in which class interests, sanctions-era commercial networks, generational divisions, and the contradictions of a hybrid theocratic-capitalist state are all in play. The crisis of legitimacy I have analysed elsewhere has not been resolved by the MoU; it has shifted onto new institutional ground. Whether the deal holds will depend less on which faction wins the immediate argument than on whether Iranian society, workers, women and young people, whose mobilisations sit alongside the negotiating team and the IRGC’s commercial leadership, finds a political voice that the current factional categories cannot contain.
