Iran's energized conservatives move to unite ahead of upcoming polls

Iran's hard-liners and conservatives appear to be maneuvering to jointly form a new grouping ahead of the 2020 parliamentary and 2021 presidential elections. Planning for such a move would entail resolving the differences among the senior figures of the camp.

In 2017, before the presidential elections, hard-liners and conservatives established a group called JAMNA, the Persian acronym for Popular Front of Islamic Revolution Forces. The name of the group was in line with hard-liners' attempts to label their rivals as disloyal to the pillars of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. However, this probably stemmed from their own concerns, and it was possibly just a method for making sure that votes were not lost to the Reformist-backed incumbent Hassan Rouhani.

JAMNA consisted of a large number of main conservative and hard-line parties. However, at the time, a number of parties, including the Islamic Coalition Party, were critical of the group while also joining it. Meanwhile, the hard-line and influential Endurance Front, led by Ayatollah Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, did not join JAMNA. While the Endurance Front and Mesbah are not popular among conservatives, they are powerful and have great influence over a number of important power centers. The reasons for this unpopularity include the front and Mesbah's lack of cooperation with their fellow parties, an issue that has been addressed by prominent hard-line Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, a spiritual leader of conservatives.

Ahead of the 2017 presidential election, JAMNA held an internal vote to decide whom to back. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a conservative who was then the mayor of Tehran, and hard-line cleric Ebrahim Raisi were given JAMNA approval to run for president. But the problem was that even these two senior figures were unwilling to recognize JAMNA and repeatedly stated that their decision to register to run in the elections was not rooted in JAMNA's green light.