The word in Tehran is that parliament Speaker Ali Larijani and President Hassan Rouhani are close to forming an alliance. If this is true, it would mean that a new and strong political camp is about to enter the arena.

Larijani, known as a moderate conservative, has been chairing parliament since 2008. Following the disputed 2009 presidential election and its violent aftermath, Larijani was labeled as “the silent man of sedition” by hard-liners who charged that he was refraining from condemning the protests. Today's conservative camp, which is increasingly defined by its hard-liners, has seen many of its senior members separate from it in past years. These include Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, chairman of the Expediency Council; Ali Akbar Nategh-Nuri, head of the Supreme Leader’s Inspection Office; and President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate conservative who remains loyal to his longtime patron, Rafsanjani.

Rafsanjani and Nategh-Nuri have been the target of conservative infighting. Both were initially marginalized by hard-liners who supported Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against Rafsanjani in the 2005 presidential election. But that wasn’t the last of it. In the televised presidential debates with candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi preceding the 2009 vote, Ahmadinejad accused Rafsanjani and Nategh-Nuri’s sons of corruption on live television. After these accusations in front of millions of Iranian viewers, neither Rafsanjani nor Nategh-Nuri were supported by their old conservative friends.

These incidents point to an overarching trend over the years — more moderate figures have been forced to part ways with the conservative camp. As a result, the latter is now dominated by hard-liners. This trajectory was accelerated under Ahmadinejad, who strengthened hard-liners more than at any point in the history of the Islamic Republic.