Iran’s hard-liners, known domestically as Principlists, are off balance for the first time in nine years following their devastating landslide defeat to political centrist Hassan Rouhani. The president-elect won with 51% of the votes, millions of which came from Reformists, who were mobilized en masse to elect who they saw as their best hope for change. Principlists Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the mayor of Tehran, and Saeed Jalili, Iran’s arch-conservative nuclear negotiator, accrued 17% and 11% of the vote, respectively.

The 2013 election will likely be the death knell for the Principlist coalition, created in 2002 to wrest control of the country away from the then-dominant Reformist bloc that had consolidated power under former presidents Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami. Following the Principlists' foray into mainstream politics in the 2004 parliamentary elections, they swept to power on the landslide runoff victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. Over the course of Ahmadinejad’s eight years in office — with the help of rulings on pesky Reformists from the conservative Guardian Council — the camp successfully purged Reformists from the body politic of Iran.

But the election of Rouhani has turned the tide on the Principlists, revealing them to be little more than a bitterly divided and disfunctional rabble. A casual observer of this month’s presidential race — one that was dominated by Principlist candidates — may be forgiven for failing to realize that they were meant to be on the same team. Ali Akbar Velayati and Ghalibaf stayed in the race until the end, even though they had declared publically that one of them would drop out for the other to avoid splitting the conservative vote. In a live televised debate, Velayati savagely criticized Jalili’s record as nuclear negotiator and at times even appeared to take the side of Rouhani.

Mehdi Khalaji of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said that the group has not splintered along ideological lines, but according to their factional allegiances or lack thereof, with key power centers within the political system of the Islamic Republic.