National Democratic Front (Iran)
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National Democratic Front
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| Leader | Hedayatollah Matin-Daftari |
| Founded | March 1979 |
| Dissolved | 1981 |
| Split from | National Front |
| Merged into | National Council of Resistance of Iran |
| Headquarters | Tehran, Iran |
| Ideology | Progressive liberalism |
| Political position | Centre-left |
The National Democratic Front (Persian: جبهه دموکراتیک ملی, translit. Jebha-ye demokrātīk-e mellī) was a liberal-left political party founded during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that overthrew shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and banned within a short time by the Islamic government. It was founded by Hedayatollah Matin-Daftari, a grandson of celebrated Iranian nationalist Mohammad Mosaddeq and a "lawyer who had been active in human rights causes" before the downfall of the shah and the son of the fourth prime minister and the jurist Ahmad Matin-Daftari. Though it was short-lived, the party has been described as one of "the three major movements of the political center" in Iran at that time, and its ouster was one of the first indications that the Islamist revolutionaries in control of the Iranian Revolution would not tolerate liberal political forces.
Matin-Daftari's party was launched in early March 1979 at a meeting attended by around one million people. This was "at a time when all shades of secular opinion outside the guerrilla movements were beginning to sense the direction of Khomeini's political strategy" and opposed the domination of the revolution by Islamist theocratics such as ran the Islamic Republic Party. It was a "broad coalition" aimed at groups and individuals who disapproved both of the National Front's closeness to Mehdi Bazargan's Provisional Revolutionary Government, and of leftist groups—such as the Tudeh Party—who refused to criticize Khomeini out of anti-imperialist solidarity. It hoped to "draw on the Mosaddeq heritage to reestablish a coalition of the middle classes and the intelligentsia". Matin-Daftari had been a member of the National Front—the other major Iranian liberal, secular party of the time—and his new party was somewhat more leftist than the NF.
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