With Hassan Rouhani as president, reformists feel there is an opportunity to improve the lives of ordinary Iranians – if they can be convinced to take part in Friday’s election

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, looks meaningfully into the camera as he holds a piece of paper poised over a plastic ballot box. “Elections are the bulwark of our nation,” proclaims the Farsi caption. “People at the polling stations will protect the destiny of our nation and prevent our enemies taking over our land.”

Khamenei is looking down from a giant poster in the courtyard of the Shahid Motahari mosque in south Tehran, a poor area where support for his ultra-conservative leadership is strong. Only a few hundred people have come to this rally but there is a flurry of excitement at the arrival of Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, the first candidate on the main list of hardline “principalists” contesting Friday’s parliamentary poll.

Haddad-Adel is followed by a media gaggle – including a few of the foreign journalists who have been given rare visas to report from Iran – as well as an officer of the Revolutionary Guards with a clenched fist and Kalashnikov badge gleaming on his dark green uniform. Speeches follow afternoon prayers in the Islamic Republic’s classic combination of faith and power.

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“The economy,” declares Haddad-Adel, “will be the main priority for the next government.” He provides a succinct summary of the theme of this country’s first elections since last summer’s landmark nuclear agreement and the lifting of international sanctions just more than a month ago. Not a single benefit has yet come from that, he complains.

The atmosphere is charged. The crowd at the blue-tiled Motahari mosque chants slogans attacking reformists, the BBC and England – still the “Little Satan” of Iran’s nationalist demonology. (America remains the “Great Satan.”) Meanwhile, Shargh, a reformist paper, lyrically foresees “a wave of hope rising” when the contest for the 290-seat majlis is over - even after the disqualification of hundreds of reformist candidates.

In parallel, clerical leaders are standing for election to the assembly of experts, a normally obscure body whose role is to choose the next supreme leader. Khamenei is 76 and reportedly suffering from prostate cancer, so whoever ends up occupying its 88 seats may have a crucially important decision to make in the coming years.

On the face of it, Friday’s votes are not as dramatic as the presidential contests in 2009, which saw the confrontational Mahmoud Ahmadinejad win re-election by rigging the results and crushing the subsequent Green movement protests, and in 2013, when the pragmatic Hassan Rouhani succeeded him as president. But in the circumstances both could be significant milestones on the path to Iran’s future, shifting the balance of internal power in favour of greater change.

The mood seems calm, though both sides recognise that the stakes are high. “This election is about protecting the regime from changes that are important to the revolution,” warned Saeed Salehi, an oil engineer listening to Haddad-Adel in the Motahari mosque. “The reformists are not experienced enough and they look to the outside world – not to our own national resources. The Iranian people have not enjoyed the good will of the west.”

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If more reformists enter parliament, their argument goes, it will help Rouhani open up the economy to deliver urgently needed improvements for millions of ordinary Iranians – in terms of jobs, growth, housing and medical care, crucially demonstrating that ending Iran’s isolation will make a real difference.

There is no doubt that this threatens the vast interests of the conservative establishment, especially the Revolutionary Guards. The president’s headline-grabbing deal to buy 118 planes from Airbus for $25bn has come under withering fire as an elite project that serves foreign rather than national interests.

Still, the scars of 2009 – with its mass street protests, killings and arrests – run deep, so no-one is rushing headlong into a new crisis. Even the most optimistic estimates say that reformists and moderates – once distinct terms that are now blurred – are unlikely to take more than 80 seats. “We are not going to have a carnival,” concedes Mohammed Ali Vakil, a leading reformist candidate. “But a lot of people will vote for us. They will be calm, but they will surprise us.”

Sadegh Zibakalam, a political scientist who is campaigning for the reformist alliance, agrees. “I am excited,” he told the Guardian by phone while getting the vote out in Khuzestan in the south-west. “If we can persuade 10%-20% of undecided voters to overcome their indifference and go to the polling stations then there could be a historic outcome. Conservative voters are determined and will definitely vote. It’s the reformists who are undecided.”

Apathy is a huge problem, however. “I voted for the revolution when I was a young man, and that was it,” shrugged Hassan, a burly 60 something driver stuck in the traffic around the capital’s Ferdowsi Square. “Why should I bother now?”

The cynicism is just as strong in the leafy north Tehran suburb of Jamaran, where Ayatollah Khomeini lived. “If you are educated you never vote because you would just make a fool of yourself,” said Negin, a young dentist smoking shisha with four friends – their loose headscarves, makeup and fashionable clothes and boots a reminder of far-reaching social changes of recent years. “It’s easier to live in Iran without thinking about politics,” sighed Melina, a designer.

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“People opposed to voting think those who do are sheep or donkeys,” said one still undecided middle-aged voter. “But the Iranian people are the only real reformers in Iran by remaining engaged and persisting in effecting change from the bottom up millimetre by millimetre. The younger generation’s higher expectations is testament to that.”

The argument for gradual change has powerful proponents. Mohammed Khatami, the reformist president of the late 1990s, has openly endorsed the Rouhani camp – his Instagram account circumventing the official ban on publishing his picture. Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president and one of the historic leaders of the revolution, is another. Rafsanjani, now 80, is drawing heavy fire from hardliners for his bid to inject a more moderate element onto the assembly of experts.

Tehran is festooned with election flyers and posters – though reformists complain that theirs have been systematically torn down at night. The campaign is far from perfect – and not only because of the mass disqualifications. Language is careful and coded; everything tightly controlled. Still, Mohammed Reza Aref, overall leader of the reform camp, is closely identified with Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, the Green leaders who are still under house arrest after having their victory “stolen” in 2009 – one vivid illustration amongst many of the limits of domestic change under Rouhani, despite his breakthrough in relations with the west.

Above all, Iranians are approaching this contest in a realistic mood – and not least because of the violence elsewhere in the region. “The simple-minded, idealistic fantasy of an Iranian-style Arab spring has gone,” argues the veteran analyst Saeed Barzin, “Iranians have become more conservative and more inclined to get involved in elections even though they know they are not free and fair. That’s important after what happened in 2009. This is based on a social contract where the state says it will provide security and a chance of economic progress and allow you to choose between political programmes that are somewhat different. It’s fairly limited on both sides.”

But reformists insist that this exercise really matters. “The nature of the election is not everything,” says a Rouhani loyalist. “No, we don’t have a full democracy – but we do have some elements. We have participation – and it’s rarely under 50%. And we have limited competition – and cut-throat competition too. They don’t have that in North Korea. No, it’s not free but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to vote. We know that the presidential election was not free either – but we voted for Rouhani – and only he could do the nuclear deal.”