As US and Israeli air strikes pounded Iran, the country’s rival factions joined together in a rare show of unity, rallying around the regime as it fought what they viewed as an existential battle.
Yet, in the three weeks since the ceasefire came into effect, long-standing divisions among rival camps within Iran’s political elite have broken into the open once again, fuelling a domestic debate over what the Islamic republic should do next.
At the heart of the dispute, which has played out in parliament and state media, is a push by Iran’s most hardline politicians to oppose the Islamic republic negotiating with the US over its nuclear programme.
Their primary target is Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the veteran parliamentary speaker who led talks to US vice-president JD Vance in Pakistan earlier this month. Politicians linked to Paydari, an influential ultra-hardline faction, suggested that negotiators have not fully followed directives set by the new supreme leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei.
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“Negotiations are now pure damage and nobody should go for negotiations,” Mahmoud Nabavian, a member of parliament close to the Paydari who accompanied Iran’s negotiating team to Pakistan, told local media.
He criticised inclusion of Iran’s nuclear programme in talks as a “strategic mistake” and implied this is not what the top leader sought. Another hardline politician, Ali Khezrian, claimed to state television that the supreme leader opposed continuing the talks.
Officials “should know that at this sensitive time their obligation is to thoroughly obey and carry out the guidelines of the supreme leader,” Nabavian said.
On Monday, 261 out of 290 MPs issued a statement supporting Ghalibaf and the other negotiators. However, prominent members of Paydari were absent from the list of signatories.
Although Khamenei has issued a statement endorsing the talks, his absence from public view since the start of the US-Israeli war against Iran on February 28th – reportedly from injuries sustained during the strikes that killed his father, long-time supreme leader Ali Khamenei – has compounded the uncertainty.
It also reflects how the assassinations of senior figures including the elder Khamenei, who had nearly four decades of experience of managing and containing internal clashes, have left a new generation of leaders to try and navigate the Islamic republic’s deepest crisis.
Nournews, an outlet affiliated with security institutions, said Iran was “perhaps at the most sensitive time in its history” and stressed the “undoubtable necessity of having one voice”.
This came to the fore after a second round of negotiations planned in Pakistan for the weekend fell apart after Iran insisted that the US lifts its blockade on the Strait of Hormuz before there could be talks.
US president Donald Trump, who announced on Saturday that he was cancelling a trip by US negotiators, has seized on Khamenei’s public absence by claiming that there was “tremendous infighting and confusion within [Iran’s] ‘leadership.’ Nobody knows who is in charge, including them.”
Iran has offered the US a proposal for it to reopen the strait and end the war, a person briefed on the talks said. US secretary of state Marco Rubio told Fox News on Monday that it was “better than what we thought they were going to submit”.
But he added: “I think there are still questions about whether the person submitting it had the authority to submit that offer.”
Iran’s top leaders insist that the republic’s different power centres – including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose influence has only grown as it assumed operational management of the war – are co-ordinating.
Ghalibaf – himself a hardliner who is considered close to Khamenei – Iran’s reformist president Masoud Pezeshkian and the country’s judiciary chief have pushed back against Trump with similar messages on X, stating that “in our Iran, there are no hardliners or moderates”.
“We are all Iranians and revolutionaries,” they said. “With the unwavering unity of the nation and the state, and complete allegiance to the supreme leader, we will make the criminal aggressor regret their actions.”
Iran’s ruling system has long been made up of competing factions, who often attack each other in public. Hardliners are ideologically opposed to negotiations with the US – which has twice in the past year attacked Iran in the midst of nuclear talks – while reformists have pushed for greater engagement with the West as a means to secure sanctions relief and bolster the regime.
The latest round of bickering also centres on personal rivalries. Ghalibaf, who is considered pragmatic and less ideological, competed against Saeed Jalili – a prominent hardliner supported by Paydari – in the 2024 presidential election. Both ultimately lost out to Pezeshkian.
[ Iran has a valuable new hostage: Donald TrumpOpens in new window ]
So far, Iranian officials have remained firm on their demand that the US lift its blockade on the strait before negotiations with Washington can resume. They also insist that Iran should be able to charge fees on shipping in the strait, retain its right to enrich uranium and not allow its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to be transferred to the US.
Even as the leadership continues to seek to project cohesion, many in Iran fear a return to open conflict with the US and Israel if the talks do not make progress, blaming hardliners for raising the political temperature.
“It will be self-sabotage if Paydari continues their campaign against decisions made at the top,” said Mohammad-Sadegh Javadi-Hesar, a reformist politician. “Without any doubt, they are trying to open up the space for their political future ... If they were able to make any changes, they wouldn’t have been weeping now.”
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
