Word: factionalism
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...politician Mohsen Rezaie. It's thought that the basij militia loyal to Ahmadinejad - who have been at the forefront of brutal attacks on opposition supporters - were there in force. While this created a potentially volatile security situation - just a gathering of hundreds of thousands of people, divided by political faction and stoked by a week of fervor - it also squeezes Mousavi and other opposition leaders politically. Khamenei didn't invite them to prayers to demonstrate their piety; he demanded a symbolic show of loyalty to the Islamic Republic itself, and its founding principle of giving ultimate political authority...
...Revolution 2.0? Despite the Twitter-enabled street scenes and revived slogans of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1979 revolution, a repeat of that successful insurrection remains highly improbable. For one thing, the protest movement is being led by a faction of the Islamic Republic's political establishment, whose members stand to lose a great deal if the regime is brought down and thus have to calibrate their dissent. More important, an unarmed popular movement can topple an authoritarian regime only if the security forces switch sides or stay neutral. But Iran's key security forces - the élite Revolutionary Guards Corps...
...attacks on demonstrators by supporters of the regime. After all, Ahmadinejad's supporters had scheduled a counterdemonstration of their own for the same part of the city, clearly looking for a fight. But it also reveals a deeper truth about the showdown currently under way: Mousavi represents a faction of the regime (whose key figure is former President Hashemi Rafsanjani) that is vying for power with a rival faction led by Ahmadinejad. The opposition candidate is not even identified as a reformist, as such, but rather a pragmatic conservative who was backed by the reformists because he had a better...
...result still means more than 70% of voters backed parties hostile to Sarkozy and his Cabinet. True, but it brings little comfort to the crowded landscape of government opponents - especially the Socialist Party (PS), whose position as the left's leading political force is now in question. The faction-riven Socialists won just 16.5%, far short of the 28.9% it won in European elections in 2004 and dangerously close to its worst showing ever...
...Whenever the topic of the radical faction is broached to union leaders, they typically emphasize the group’s small representation within a sprawling community. “It’s pretty clear that the vast majority of members of the union believe in a thoughtful, constructive approach,” Jaeger says carefully when asked about Reform HUCTW...