Iran’s hardline Paydari Front eyes a political vacuum after Raisi’s death

The sudden death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has plunged the Islamic Republic into a political fog as thick as that enveloping the mountainous Varzeqan region of northern Iran, where Raisi’s helicopter went down on Sunday.

The crash came a week after the country held run-off parliamentary elections, with the influential position of speaker in the unicameral Majlis still to be decided. While the executive and legislative branches of the government are currently leaderless, the most powerful man in the land, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, turned 85 in April and is believed to be in frail health.

In accordance with the Iranian constitution, the country’s first vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, was appointed transitional president on Monday and called for a presidential election in 50 days.

The focus now shifts to the June 28 election, with Iran monitors both inside and outside the country keeping an eye on the presidential hopefuls who get the green light from the Guardians Council, the constitutional watchdog charged with approving candidates.

The next few weeks are likely to see a period of intense political jockeying, much of it behind closed doors. Backroom politics has characterised Iran’s nezam, or political system, since the 1979 revolution, with factionalism and informal decision-making filling the gap created by the absence of transparent political institutions.

During his 35 years as supreme leader, Khamenei has overseen a rise in factionalism with competing camps sometimes splintering and bickering for power.

As the Islamic Republic heads for its 14th presidential election, supporters and students of a hardline cleric dubbed “Ayatollah Crocodile” threaten to turn the Iranian political parlour game into a blood sport.

The Paydari Front, called the Jebhe Paydari in Iran and sometimes translated as the “Steadfastness” or “Endurance” Front, are a faction of ideological diehards who consider the late Ayatollah Mohammad Mesbah-Yazdi – the crocodile ayatollah – as their spiritual mentor.

Controversial and reviled by Iranian moderates and reformists, the Paydari Front rose in prominence during Raisi’s term. Since the late president was a Khamenei loyalist, experts say the Paydari’s ascendance could not have happened without the consent or acquiescence of Iran’s supreme leader.

But as an ageing Khamenei leads a country plagued with high levels of domestic discontent and confronting serious international challenges to a snap poll, many analysts are wary of the Paydari Front’s stranglehold on power and what that could mean for Iran’s future.

‘Pumping ideology into the veins of the regime’

The Paydari Front in its current form was founded as a political party in 2011 under hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was not a coincidence. The party’s ideology of strictly following the principles of the Islamic Revolution matched Ahmadinejad’s hardline conservatism.

The ideology was shaped by Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, a deeply conservative cleric who taught most of the party’s founding members in Iranian seminaries and religious institutions.

“He argued against elections in Iran, which he believed should simply be a religious dictatorship. He had extremely anti-American, very conservative, social values – women must wear the hijab, a very repressive, heavy use of the death penalty, that sort of thing,” explained Barbara Slavin, distinguished fellow at the Washington, DC-based Stimson Center and director of the Middle East Perspective project. “He died in 2021, but his ideas live on.”

But Mesbah-Yazdi’s ideas did not always find favour with Iran’s presidents. When moderate Hassan Rouhani came to power in 2013, he tried to marginalise the party, according to Saeid Golkar, an expert on Iran at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “But around 2019, 2020, they came out again. They took the parliament in the 2020 legislative elections and supported Raisi in the 2021 presidential election. Raisi was not an official member of the party, but he was strongly supported by the Paydari. They were very close allies. Under Raisi, the Paydari expanded its influence in the state bureaucracy,” explained Golkar.

Over the years, the Paydari Front infiltrated Iran’s state institutions, including the military and the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in what experts liken to state capture, in which a faction takes control of state institutions. “These people usually go to the military or the IRGC or the state bureaucracy as ideological indoctrinators. They go in and they teach. They have a very strong influence over the IRGC in indoctrination and political training,” said Golkar, explaining the workings of the Paydari as an “ideological pump to raise the level of ideology in the state, the military and the administration. They are pumping ideology into the veins of the regime.”

This state capture was on display during the crackdown on the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian-Kurdish woman, in September 2022. As anti-veil protests spread across the country, the regime doubled down, with Paydari parliamentarians playing a critical role in pushing through a draconian “Hijab and Chastity” law. The 2023 law increased prison sentences for “inappropriately” dressed women and introduced punishments for employers, as well as cinema and shopping mall owners, who did not enforce the dress codes on their premises.

Read moreIran’s regime crushes protests ahead of Mahsa Amini's death anniversary

Conservative pragmatists give way to diehard ideologues

The Iranian political landscape has been marked by a binary Reformist-Conservative configuration for decades. But the US pullout from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal effectively crushed the reformist camp, as the conservatives opposed to any deals with the “Great Satan” emerged to put a stranglehold on power. Under the hardline Raisi, Iran’s conservatives moved further right.

Within the conservative camp, the ascendance of the ultra-conservative Paydari Front caught the attention of British weekly The Economist after the first round of the parliamentary election in March, which the party swept.

Differentiating between the old school “gruff conservative pragmatists” and a rising “group of ideological diehards”, The Economist noted that Paydari Front members “are to Iran what the religious hard right are to Israel”.

Traditional conservatives are keenly aware of Iran’s military weaknesses compared to arch foes Israel and the United States. In the past, IRGC commanders were “ready to work with the West if they thought that doing so bolstered the regime”, The Economist noted. 

“But the Paydari Front sees their earthly battle in divine terms,” the weekly observed. A messianic Shiite vision of a fight against an anti-Muslim tyrant increases the security risks in a tinderbox region reeling from the fallout of the Israel-Hamas war. 

As supreme leader, Khamenei has the ultimate say in major military decisions. His inherent caution was evident on April 13, when Iran retaliated for the April 1 Israeli bombing of its embassy compound in Damascus. Iran's missile and drone attack came after Tehran gave Israel and its allies three days of notice to protect their airspace, resulting in relatively minor injuries and damage to infrastructure.

‘The catfights at the top’

But Khamenei is ageing, and the hardline takeover effort that began more than a decade ago could upset the fine balance that has kept Iran and Israel from waging a major, conventional war.

While Khamenei might be cautious on the regional front, his support for domestic hardliners have seen hawkish factions such as the Paydari Front gain disproportionate power in the nezum.  

“They're kind of the last man standing. The system has gotten nasty and all the other factions, the pragmatists, even some of the traditional conservative factions, have been sidelined,” said Slavin. “They appear to be the last survivors of the long political game in Iran, particularly under Khamenei.”

Golkar believes it’s all gone according to plan. “Ayatollah Khamenei put a plan in action in order to have a smooth succession. And the plan he put in action since 2019 was to make sure the state, the government, the administration is aligned ideologically with Ayatollah Khamenei. He wants his ideas, his regime to outlive himself,” he explained.

For Khamenei, Iran’s late president was the ideal successor to take on the supreme leader position, according to Golkar. “Khamenei wants to have somebody with the same mentality, the same ideology, the same political view,” he said. Raisi’s sudden death in a helicopter crash on Sunday was “a hiccup in the Ayatollah Khamenei plan. But he will find somebody that has the same political view and ideology as Raisi.”

As the country gears up for a presidential election and the appointment of a parliamentary speaker, experts believe the Paydari Front is particularly well placed to handle the backroom machinations between the political factions. “Think about the Islamic Republic as a patron-client network system. There are a lot of patrons. The Paydari is one patron with its own clients,” explained Golkar. “They are the most cohesive group and the most ideological. Because of the ideology and because of the cohesiveness, they are much more difficult to defeat compared to the other groups that are much more opportunistic.”

For most Iranians chafing under a system that has ignored their aspirations, suppressed their demand for civil liberties, and failed to provide economic prosperity or development, the political wranglings hardly matter.

“I think the young people of Iran, in particular, couldn’t care less about the political machinations at the top. They've rejected the whole system. Anyone who's ever pledged loyalty to the Islamic Republic is largely alien now to a lot of Iran's younger population. So this is an inside game, it’s played by insiders. Most young Iranians are just trying to make a living, in many cases, to leave the country if they have the requisite credentials. They will ignore the catfights at the top,” said Slavin.

But as the ideological gap between the rulers and the people widens, experts warn that a Paydari domination is unlikely to benefit the country or its long-suffering populace. “I guess the most ruthless win out, particularly in a system like Iran’s,” said Slavin. “They just managed to climb the greasy pole and that's where they are. But of course, this makes the whole system even more fragile. So while they may have a triumph now, you have to question the legitimate longevity of the system when its base is so narrow.”