Mediaboss Marketing

It's too soon to determine conservatives' prospects for elections in parliament next year, but they have lately failed to achieve unity, he added.

"Right now they look poised to replay a bad movie we've already seen," said Kupchan. "They did not unite behind one person in the presidential election, and they lost badly."

If Rouhani's allies can use the 2016 parliamentary elections to get supportive lawmakers elected, they can put him in a winning position for the next presidential election and buy him time to implement economic reform, said Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an Iranian professor of economics at Virginia Tech.

Read MoreUS and Iran could have a friendlier future ahead

While some Iranians have grown disappointed with Rouhani in the absence of progress on his campaign promises, they remain in favor of rapprochement with the outside world, he said.

"I see Rouhani's emergence as a middle-class movement for global cooperation and a better life for the average Iranian," he said. "It is very much in tune with working with America, working with Europe."

At first glance, expanding trade may appear at odds with Iran's so-called resistance economy, a 12-point stratagem laid out by Ayatollah Khamenei that has sought to reduce the effects of sanctions by making the country more self-reliant.

But many of those principles are not inconsistent with globalization, Salehi-Isfahani said. What's more, the concept of the resistance economy is fairly vague, so Khamenei could support greater openness without being seen to have compromised his values, he added.

Read more from the original source:
The new & improved Iran? Not yet