MOSCOW, February 26. /TASS/. Iran’s elections to the national parliament and the clerical body called Assembly of Experts, empowered to appoint the Supreme Leader, are crucial to the country’s future development. Their outcome will largely determine whether President Hassan Rouhani will have a chance to go ahead with his reformist policies. In the eyes of the Iranian people Rouhani’s greatest achievements were the conclusion of the nuclear deal with the West and the eventual lifting of economic sanctions. Yet analysts are very cautious in their forecasts regarding the likely winner - the united coalition of politicians and moderate, reform-minded parties supportive of the incumbent president or the coalition of conservatives critical of Rouhani’s policy of rapprochement with the West.

The fundamentalists have controlled Iran’s political institutions for the past ten years. The government and the moderate forces are keen to change the situation, to gain control of parliament to ensure it should not confront the government or interfere with reforms.

"The elections are of exceptional importance first and foremost for President Rouhani himself," the senior research fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Oriental Studies Institute, Vladimir Sazhin, told TASS. "Rouhani and his team need support from both the Iranian parliament and the Assembly of Experts. The current parliament is critical of many aspects of the president’s policies."

The split into reformers and fundamentalists is largely abstract, says Sazhin, an expert at the Russian International Affairs Council. "The political system is rather complex. Movements and factions are many. Among the fundamentalists there are liberals, pragmatics, moderates and radicals. The same applies to the reformers." All analysts, he said, just recently predicted that Rouhani’s reform-minded supporters would emerge the winners, because the conclusion of the nuclear deal with the international community had met with vast approval inside Iran. "This generated expectations of the reformers’ land-slide victory. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei was aware of that. The reformers getting a majority in parliament is not exactly what he would like to see. He needs a balance of forces. In that case it will be easier for him to govern from above. He needs dual power. If either side gains an advantage, the task will be far harder to cope with."