Ahmadinejad will harden policies

But a tougher Iranian stance on its controversial nuclear program and other issues will emerge only slowly through Iran's system of clerical rule that gives Supreme Leader Ali Ayatollah Khamenei the final say in state affairs, analysts say.

And they say the latest conservative victory will expose internal rifts in the conservative camp and may encourage more political pragmatism because they no longer have reformists under outgoing President Mohammad Khatami to blame for failures.

Ahmadinejad, who swept to victory in Friday's presidential vote over moderate cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, takes over in August from Khatami, whose own policies of political reforms and detente with the West were ambushed by hardline bodies.

"Over time, we will see a hardening of the (Iran's) position. It will not be immediate," said Iranian analyst Mahmoud Alinejad, adding it would involve a more chauvinistic foreign policy and a focus on domestic, not foreign, investment.

"It will be a policy that has the danger of confrontation although there are pragmatic people who might try to prevent that," he said, adding that Ahmadinejad had won over Iran's religious poor by presenting himself as an outsider.

Ahmadinejad's victory was the latest by a new breed of hardline politicians, many of them former Revolutionary Guardsmen, who won local council and parliamentary elections in 2003 and 2004 amid disillusionment with the slow pace of change and frustration among the poor that their lot had not improved.