Hezbollah – the party of God, in Arabic – was notorious throughout the 1980s for being an extremist militant organisation involved in a string of kidnappings targeting westerners in the 1980s. But since the early 1990s, the Lebanese Shia fundamentalist group has slowly engaged in the Lebanese post-civil war political process, while retaining its military wing, the Islamic Resistance, to fight Israel's occupation of South Lebanon.

Last Week, the party's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, announced its candidates for June's parliamentary elections. In his slate are three new candidates, including an academic, Ali Fayyad, a PhD holder who runs the party's think tank, and Nawaf al-Musawi, a French-educated old guard who runs Hezbollah's external relations.

This "intellectual" slate, as one Lebanese columnist dubbed it, marked yet another change in Hezbollah's political evolution from a secluded shadowy organisation into a larger party concerned with its public image. When Hezbollah first contemplated participation in the political process, it had to seek a fatwa – a religious edict – to allow its candidates to participate in "non-Islamic" parliamentary elections (Lebanon's parliament is split by constitution into Christian and Muslim halves). Seven candidates – comprised of three clergymen and militant activists – ran on the party's elections' slate.

For the first time in Lebanon – a multi-confessional country with a consociational political system – Shia clergy became members of parliament. In the 1996 elections, Hezbollah brought more changes to its parliamentary bloc; fewer clergy and more lay activists including an academic. The clergy were excluded in the last two rounds of elections, allowing new faces to be included, more adept at representing the party's wider support base. The salience of Hezbollah's political divergence from mainstream Lebanese politics dwindled throughout the various phases of its political participation. Since 2005, Hezbollah has been represented in two Lebanese cabinets, an engagement once considered forbidden due to the state's "un-Islamic" nature.

To better put those changes in perspective, political engagement has seen Hezbollah change from a revolutionary party that once believed in establishing an Islamic state in Lebanon, into a political group involved in daily governmental politics, unions, and concerned with its supporters' demands. Today, the party, while still mainly defined by its stance in the Israeli-Arab conflict, has a say on variety of issues such as privatisation, economic development in rural areas and subsidising basic services and goods.

Mind you the picture isn't all bright. The party's arsenal and militia remain a controversial issue in Lebanon, especially after its use in a mini civil war last May which ended in a political agreement in Doha.

Nevertheless, its engagement in political dialogue with its foes, its alliances with Christian leaders and secular groups – such as the Lebanese Communist party – indicates a significant change from the exclusive revolutionary party that it once was.

Such political engagement – which has recently won the praise of the British government – was bound to change its relationship with yet another Islamist group, not far from Lebanon, Hamas.

Months after Hamas's victory in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, Israel imprisoned a third of Hamas's cabinet and dozens of its MPs, including the parliamentary speaker in retaliation at the capture of an Israeli soldier, Gilead Shalit. This crackdown on the political process and the subsequent events, including the Palestinian infighting, has further radicalised the Islamist group, alienating at times even a close ally like Hezbollah.

During the Gaza conflict last December, al-Aqsa television, part of Hamas's media network, broadcasted an anti-Hezbollah rant by a Saudi cleric. After praising Hamas and condemning what he called "the holocaust in Gaza", he called Hezbollah "the devil's party" and its leader "Satan". He then said that Shias – the religious sect to which Hezbollah belongs – are "the Jews' donkeys, they ride them during sedition". The outburst went on without interruption from Hamas's TV administrators. In response, Hezbollah reportedly cut broadcast of al-Aqsa TV via local controllers in Beirut's southern suburbs, its major support base in Lebanon.

Al-Aqsa TV broadcasted an apology for several days after the war and the issue was eventually resolved; yet the whole episode was reminiscent of the very first contacts between the two groups, specifically in December 1992, when Israel exiled 417 Palestinian activists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements to the marj al zohoor area in southern Lebanon, then a buffer zone between the Israeli army and Lebanese resistance groups, including Hezbollah. The latter sent an envoy to meet the exiled activists; but Hamas initially refused to engage with Hezbollah's envoy on the grounds that they belonged to a defective Muslim sect, Shia Islam. Progressing from that, Hamas went on to form alliances with Hezbollah and Iran, as well as engaging with nationalist and non-Muslim groups, and even had a Greek Orthodox Christian candidate on its election ticket. The Israeli crackdown and the following events altered the course of those changes.

What remains true though is that Hezbollah's political evolution sets a model for engaging popular Islamist groups in political processes, rather than pursuing a policy of alienation that might prove costly, leading only to further radicalisation in an already volatile region.