Nothing came unexpectedly in the Iranian presidential race. While Ebrahim Raisi’s election was a done deal, the only questions were about the size of voter turnout and who would vote for him. But Raisi’s ascent to power wasn’t to happen without open support from the establishment as a whole, the Principlists as a political current and the so-called “Hezbollahis” — a rising revolutionary power that functioned under the mantle of the Principlists for the past two decades and seems now ready to announce itself as a new and main player in the Iranian political arena.

“With the election of Sayed Ebrahim Raisi, we’ll see a much more revolutionary Iran than before,” a source close to the Raisi campaign told Al-Monitor, using an honorific common in Iran. The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Raisi wasn’t ever a Principlist, stressing the president-elect himself said this when he ran for office in 2017 and in the last election reiterated he’s not running under the Principlist flag. The source added, “The Iranian political scene will be restructured; a new political current is going to rise, neither Reformist nor Principlist. Rather, a revolutionary Hezbollahi.”

The Hezbollahis are known to be very loyal to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and they are the cornerstone of the “Second Phase of the Islamic Revolution” he announced back in February 2019. The announcement, which came on the 40th anniversary of the revolution, seemed more of a manifesto that’s aimed at highlighting the final step of the transition from Khomeinism (in reference to the founder of the Islamic Republic, Imam Ruhollah Khomeini) to Khameneism, where Khamenei is seen by his loyal followers in Iran and away not only as the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic but also as the leader of the continuing revolution.

“The younger Hezbollahis were trained very much to be loyal to Khamenei and his vision of the Islamic Republic,” said Narges Bajoghli, author of “Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic,” in an interview with Al-Monitor. She said while we can say we’re seeing Khamenei’s vision usurp Khomeini’s, “I’d say we need to be cautious not to read too much into this yet, as these younger Hezbollahis are not blind ideologues.” Bajoghli said there were “huge debates and anger expressed among some of these elements after the Guardian Council’s announcement of who it had vetted for the elections. So, while they follow Khamenei, they are not shy to express their disagreements publicly and challenge their elders. This, I think, will be the harder tension for the upper echelons of conservatives to deal with during Raisi’s tenure.”