Iranian principlists

Iranian Principlists
Spiritual leaderGholam-Ali Haddad-Adel
Parliamentary leaderMohammad Bagher Ghalibaf
Preceded byTraditional Right
Ideology
Factions:
Political positionRight-wing to far-right
ReligionShia Islam
Opponents
Executive branch
PresidentNo
Ministers
6 / 19 (32%)
Vice Presidents
1 / 14 (7%)
Parliament
SpeakerMohammad Bagher Ghalibaf
Seats
198 / 290 (68%)
Judicial branch
Chief JusticeGholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje'i
StatusDominant
Oversight bodies
Assembly of Experts
59 / 88 (67%)
Guardian Council
6 / 12 (50%)
Expediency Council
38 / 48 (79%)
City Councils
Tehran
21 / 21 (100%)
Mashhad
15 / 15 (100%)
Isfahan
13 / 13 (100%)
Shiraz
1 / 13 (8%)
Qom
13 / 13 (100%)
Tabriz
6 / 13 (46%)
Yazd
11 / 11 (100%)
Rasht
9 / 11 (82%)

The Principlists (Persian: اصول‌گرایان, romanized: Osul-Garāyān, lit. 'followers of principles, fundamentalists'), also interchangeably known as the Iranian hardliners, Iranian Conservatives and formerly referred to as the Right or Right-wing, are one of two main political camps in post-revolutionary Iran; the Reformists are the other camp. The term hardliners that some Western sources use in the Iranian political context usually refers to the faction. The faction rejects the status quo internationally, but favors domestic preservation.

Demographics

According to a poll conducted by the Iranian Students Polling Agency (ISPA) in April 2017, 15% of Iranians identify as leaning Principlist. In comparison, 28% identify as leaning Reformist.

In April 2021, a joint public opinion survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and IranPoll found out that 19% of Iranians identified as Principlist while 7% were leaning Principlist, and if Reformists (21%) and leaning Reformist (10%) were still higher, they also noted that "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."

Factions

Election results

Presidential elections

Year Candidate(s) Votes % Rank
1997 Ali Akbar Nategh-Nouri 7,248,317 24.87 2nd
2001 Ahmad Tavakkoli 4,387,112 15.58 2nd
2005/1 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 5,711,696 19.43 2nd
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf 4,095,827 13.93 4th
Ali Larijani 1,713,810 5.83 6th
Total11,521,33339.19Runoff
2005/2 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 17,284,782 61.69 1st
2009 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 24,527,516 62.63 1st
Mohsen Rezaee 678,240 1.73 3rd
Total25,205,75664.36Won
2013 Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf 6,077,292 16.56 2nd
Saeed Jalili 4,168,946 11.36 3rd
Mohsen Rezaee 3,884,412 10.58 4th
Ali Akbar Velayati 2,268,753 6.18 6th
Total16,399,40344.68Lost
2017 Ebrahim Raisi 15,835,794 38.28 2nd
Mostafa Mir-Salim 478,267 1.16 3rd
Total16,314,06139.44Lost
2021 Ebrahim Raisi 18,021,945 72.35 1st
Mohsen Rezaee 3,440,835 13.81 2nd
Total21,462,78086.16Won
2024/1 Saeed Jalili 9,473,298 40.38 2nd
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf 3,363,340 14.34 3rd
Mostafa Pourmohammadi 206,397 0.88 4th
Total13,043,03555.60Runoff
2024/2 Saeed Jalili 13,538,179 45.24 2nd

Parliament

Exclusive seats Election ±
54 / 290 (19%)
 2000Steady
196 / 290 (68%)
 2004Increase 142
195 / 290 (67%)
 2008Decrease 1
184 / 290 (63%)
 2012Decrease 11
86 / 290 (30%)
 2016Decrease 98
221 / 290 (76%)
 2020 Increase 135
199 / 290 (69%)
 2024 Decrease 22

Parties and organizations

Alliances

Electoral

Media

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ The Principists officially say they are against the "Zionist regime", but they frequently show antisemitic views (including Holocaust denials).
  2. ↑ "Ultraconservatives" are also referred to as "Neoconservatives" or "Neo-fundamentalists".

References

  1. 1 2 Said 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 term eshlahgara, or reformist, and is applied to a camp of not necessarily congruous groups and individuals.
  2. 1 2 3 Randjbar-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.
  3. 1 2 "Threading the Needle: How President Pezeshkian Could Reshape Iranian Politics". Harvard International Review. 30 December 2024. Retrieved 10 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.
  4. 1 2 "Iran's political shake-up and Ebrahim Raisi as president". Responsible Statecraft. 23 August 2021. Retrieved 10 January 2026.
  5. ↑ "Iran's 2017 elections: All you need to know". Al Jazeera. 20 May 2017. Retrieved 15 March 2026. Reformists are the more liberal side, as they believe in opening Iran up to the world, liberalisng [sic] economic policy, encouraging foreign investment in the country, and focusing on the rights of Iranian citizens. ... Principlists are the conservatives of Iranian politics.
  6. ↑
  7. ↑ M. Mohebi (April 30, 2016). The Formation of Civil Society in Modern Iran: Public Intellectuals and the State. Palgrave Macmillan US. p. 130. Principlists are regarded as ultra-conservative, right-wing politicians with a populist approach. Their political ideology has been closely aligned with that of Khomeini.
  8. ↑ 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.
  9. ↑ 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 of Mohammad 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.
  10. 1 2 Mehdi 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'.
  11. ↑
  12. ↑ Matthias Küntzel (2014). Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold. Telos Press Publishing.
  13. ↑ Litvak, Meir (2006). "The Islamic Republic of Iran and the Holocaust: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism". Journal of Israeli History. 25 (1). doi:10.1080/13531040500502874.
  14. ↑ Ali M. Ansari (2007). Iran Under Ahmadinejad: The Politics of Confrontation. Routledge. p. 158.
  15. ↑ Will Atkinson (2025). For a New Political Sociology: The Relational Approach of Pierre Bourdieu. Taylor & Francis. p. 2014.
  16. ↑ Kameel Ahmady, colleagues (2025). The Peoples of Iran. Avaye Buf Publishing. p. 682. In its place, an uncompromising ideology derived from right-wing Principlism touting revolutionary aspirations, absolute allegiance to the Guardianship of the Jurist, and strident anti-imperialism—revived and fortified its power base, becoming the sole, unrivalled discourse in the arena of Iranian politics (Qasemi et al., 2020).
  17. ↑
  18. 1 2 3 4 Sherrill, Clifton (2011). "After Khamenei: Who Will Succeed Iran's Supreme Leader?". Orbis. 55 (4): 631–47. doi:10.1016/j.orbis.2011.07.002.
  19. 1 2 Barbara 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.
  20. ↑
  21. ↑ Mehdi Moslem (2002), Factional Politics in Post-Khomeini Iran, Syracuse University Press, p. 135, ISBN 9780815629788
  22. 1 2 3 Melody 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
  23. 1 2 Robert J. Reardon (2012), Containing Iran: Strategies for Addressing the Iranian Nuclear Challenge, RAND Corporation, pp. 81–82, ISBN 978-0833076373
  24. ↑
  25. ↑ Tait, Robert (18 August 2010). "Iranian President's New 'Religious-Nationalism' Alienates Hard-Line Constituency". Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
  26. ↑ 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.
  27. ↑ "U.S. Must Be Wary as Iran's Parliament Veers Hard Right". Critical Threats Project. 26 February 2020. Retrieved 10 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.
  28. ↑ "Iran's Moderate Conservatives Might Make A Comeback In 2024". Iran International. 3 April 2022. Retrieved 10 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.
  29. ↑
  30. ↑ "Freedom in the World: Iran", Freedom House, 2017, archived from the original on 17 May 2017, retrieved 25 May 2017
  31. ↑ Axworthy, Michael (2016), Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic, Oxford University Press, p. 430, ISBN 9780190468965
  32. ↑ 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.
  33. ↑ 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.
  34. ↑ Robin B. Wright, ed. (2010), The Iran Primer: Power, Politics, and U.S. Policy, US Institute of Peace Press, p. 37, ISBN 978-1601270849
  35. ↑ 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 themselves Osul-gara. The word osul (plural of asl) 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 themselves Ommat 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 as mohafezeh-kar ('conservative'). Between 1997 and 2006, many Iranians inside Iran used the terms eqtedar-gara ('authoritarian') and tamamiyat-khah ('totalitarian') for what many Western observers have termed 'hard-liners'. Members of the reformist faction of the fundamentalist oligarchy called the hard-liners eqtedar-gara.
  36. ↑ Etel Solingen, ed. (2012), Sanctions, Statecraft, and Nuclear Proliferation, Cambridge University Press, p. 222, ISBN 9781107010444
  37. ↑ "Poll Results of Popular Leaning Towards Principlists and Reformists", Iranian Students Polling Agency (ISPA) (in Persian), 28 April 2017, retrieved 1 June 2017 – via Khabaronline
  38. ↑ "Disappointed in Rouhani, Iranians Seek a Different Sort of Leader in June Elections". Chicago Council on Global Affairs. 9 April 2021. Archived from the 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.
  39. ↑ Thaler; et al. (2010). Mullahs, Guards, and Bonyads: An Exploration of Iranian Leadership Dynamics. Sacramento, CA: RAND Corporation. ISBN 978-0-8330-4773-1.
  40. ↑ John Ghazvinian (January 26, 2021). America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. p. 434.