In the last week of May, the Iranian parliament elected its new speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. It was a major career move for someone who played numerous roles in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), dating back to 1982, before serving for 12 years as the mayor of Tehran. It was also the latest example of growing dominance of Iran’s government institutions by the IRGC and other hardline entities.
In a sense, Ghalibaf’s election was inevitable. He had the support of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who wields absolute power over matters of state.
The current makeup of the legislative body was determined in February when the Islamic Republic held national elections. Although government authorities routinely praise such elections as symbols of popular, democratic support for the theocratic system, the reality is that genuine alternatives have been barred from the process since the immediate aftermath of the 1979 revolution. And more than that, voices of opposition have been variously suppressed in ordinary society, as well, often with fatal consequences.
International support for the Iranian Resistance could help Iranians to achieve long-withheld representation in their own government
After seizing power, the mullahs were quick to suppress any opposition. And less than a year later, as they faced a rising tide of pro-democracy activism led by the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK), the authorities attempted to brutally suppress that group. In the summer of 1988, political prisoners throughout Iran were pulled from their cells and brought before tribunals to answer questions about their ideological affiliations and their loyalty to the clerical system. Those who failed to appease the judges were summarily executed, and the vast majority of the 30,000 victims turned out to be members of the PMOI.
This is not to say that the regime succeeded in erasing factionalism from Iranian politics. Rather, it confined mainstream political discourse to a narrow range of ideologies and began to trade between so-called reformists and hardliners throughout the life of the regime. At various times over the past four decades, the two factions have traded the greater share of political power not reserved for the supreme leader. But naturally the supreme leader has always had the authority to overrule any given power-sharing arrangement, and he did exactly that in the run-up to last February’s elections.
The Guardian Council, which is responsible for enforcing compliance with the constitution, Islamic law, and the will of the supreme leader, barred nearly all reformist candidates from running for office. Those who were purged from the rolls included several incumbents, and the result was an even greater lack of choice than the public had grown accustomed do.
Millions of Iranians responded to the situation with a boycott of the polls, in line with calls from the Resistance movement to “vote for regime change.” The turnout in February’s elections was the lowest in the history of the Islamic Republic. However, the consolidation of hardline power proceeded as planned, and Ghalibaf’s parliamentary leadership surely set the stage for even more mainstream political support of the sorts of crackdowns already promoted by Judiciary Chief Ebrahim Raisi. The well-known “hanging judge” and major participant in the 1988 massacre was assigned as the head of the judiciary last year.
Under his leadership, the judiciary has overseen some of the worst attacks on protesters and dissidents that the country has seen in many years. In November 2019, a nationwide uprising prompted agents of Intelligence Ministry and Ghalibaf’s beloved IRGC to open fire on crowds with live ammunition, killing an estimated 1,500 people. Such incidents tend to elicit not only justification but outright pride from Ghalibaf, whose public image has been defined by a professed willingness to personally “wield clubs” in the streets to support the theocratic system.
This fact goes a long way toward explaining Khamenei’s preference for Ghalibaf’s leadership. And that preference appears to stem from the same root cause as the overall trend toward driving out reformists and elevating hardline figures who offer full-throated support of violent repression. The November uprising is one part of that cause. But in a larger sense, the regime’s leadership has been driven to the brink of panic by a rise in popular Resistance, particularly under the leadership of an opposition group that authorities tried to destroy, in vain, since more than 30 years.
The PMOI has grown in popularity and domestic organization ever since its members were targeted en masse in the 1988 massacre. It now stands at the head of a coalition known as the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which enjoys multi-partisan support among policymakers throughout much of the world. Hundreds of those supporters can be expected to join tens of thousands of Iranian expatriates later in the summer at an event to highlight the clerical regime’s vulnerability and strategize for the replacement of theocratic dictatorship with a true democracy that offers representation to diverse voices.
But the NCRI’s international efforts are ancillary to the domestic activism of PMOI resistance units. These played a major role in the November uprising and also in a previous uprising that spanned much of January 2018. Even Supreme Leader Khamenei has acknowledged this role and has plainly begun to portray the PMOI as the single greatest threat to his hold on power. The world would be well advised to pay attention to this fact in advance of the NCRI gathering in July. It goes to show that international support for the Iranian Resistance could help Iranians to achieve long-withheld representation in their own government, to say nothing of preventing the crimes against humanity that grow more imminent with each new hardline power grab.
The writer is Iranian human rights activist and analyst based in Europe