TEHRAN, Iran — In October 2014, Ayatollah Mohammad-Reza Mahdavi Kani, an influential leader of the conservative coalition, passed away. The event has posed significant problems for Iran's conservatives. Mahdavi Kani's successor as the head of the Assembly of Experts — the body that chooses the supreme leader — must be chosen by early 2015. Furthermore, both the Assembly of Experts elections and the parliamentary elections in 2016 will need a unifying voice within the conservative camp — a voice that is currently lacking with the passing of Mahdavi Kani.

One person being unofficially discussed as successor is Ali Akbar Nategh-Nouri, the current head of the Inspection Office of the Supreme Leader of Iran. Nategh-Nouri could recover the relative solidarity of earlier decades within the conservative camp or, at least, prevent it from further fracture.

The conservatives had fractured long before Mahdavi Kani’s death. Saeed Laylaz, a political analyst, told Al-Monitor, "When Mr. Mahdavi Kani was alive, he could not prevent the collapse of the coalition of conservatives in the election.” Laylaz said that “the rise of radicalism” led by Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi and former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was first elected in 2005, “marginalized the senior conservative officials.”

When Mahdavi Kani was alive, many analysts believed that Nategh-Nouri could revive the traditional conservatives. In 1997, eight years before Ahmadinejad's candidacy, Nategh-Nouri was the consensus candidate of the conservative coalition during the presidential elections. Although many politicians and analysts thought that Nategh-Nouri would win the election, Mohammad Khatami won the election and the Reformist coalition seized power.