After Iran's sham elections, the 'king' in exile should be seen for what he is: a useful idiot for the tyrannical mullahs – Struan Stevenson

The Iranian people want democracy and there is no place for the son of the Shah deposed in 1979

There is little support for a repeat of the 1967 coronation of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran (Picture: David Cairns/Getty Images)

The charade of alleged ‘elections’ in Iran took place on March 1. Despite repeated appeals by the Supreme Leader and his cronies, the overwhelming majority of the Iranian people stayed away. The boycott was nationwide, with the leading candidate in Tehran securing less than eight per cent of the votes by those eligible to cast their ballots.

Quick to exploit the mass boycott of the election, spin doctors for Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed Shah of Iran, claimed the majority of Iranians clearly longed for the restoration of the monarchy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like the famous tale by Hans Christian Andersen about the Emperor who has no clothes, Reza Pahlavi continues to stride naked across the world stage, naively believing he is wearing the resplendent robes of a monarch.

Meanwhile, in repeated uprisings that have shaken the Iranian regime to the core, demonstrators are heard to chant, “Death to the oppressor, be it the Shah or the Sheikh”, indicating that they want democracy, not autocratic tyranny. The demonstrators are clearly giving voice to the defining curse that has thwarted the Iranian people’s democratic aspirations for generations, namely the corrupt and brutal alliance, whether tacit or explicit, between Iran’s monarchists and its clerics.

Divine right to rule

The overthrow of the Shah in the 1979 revolution was hailed by the Iranian people as a deliverance from cruel oppression. The monarchy's relationship with the clergy, who hijacked the revolution to seize power, was a complex one. The Shah had initially shown fidelity to religious customs and leaned on the clergy during the first two decades of his rule.

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It was a symbiotic relationship. The monarchy derived its ‘divine’ claim to legitimacy from the clergy, and the clergy derived its social power and wealth from the monarchy's acquiescence. The two institutions were a major impediment to the formation of a developed civic society based on democratic values and human rights. The clergy, with some exceptions, tried to stay in the Shah's favor and maintained pervasive relations with Savak, the Shah’s hated secret police, who brutally murdered and tortured political activists and intellectuals, including authors, academics, artists, and poets. But following widespread demonstrations against his oppressive rule, the Shah fled in January 1979, never to return.

In 1980, after his father's death, Reza Pahlavi said he wanted Iran to have a constitutional monarchy. Despite claiming that he would like the Iranian people to have the freedom to choose if they wished to restore him as King, he nevertheless proclaimed himself Reza Shah II while living in Egypt. But, despite abundant financial resources about which he has never been entirely transparent, he has failed to assemble significant supporters of the monarchy in exile or form a cohesive opposition group or organisation during the past four-and-a-half decades. His failure to emerge as a credible opposition figure has underlined the fact that the monarchy is a spent force that belongs to the past and has nothing to offer for the future of Iran.

Terrorist organisations

Indeed, Reza Pahlavi has previously inflamed hostility in Iran by negotiating with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the theocratic regime’s reviled equivalent of the Gestapo. During a talk-show interview with Iran International TV in 2018, he said: “I am in bilateral contacts with the (regime’s) military, the IRGC and the Basij. We are communicating. They are signalling their readiness and expressing willingness to align with the people.”

It is the warmongering IRGC and their paramilitary Basij, which have shot, arrested, tortured, raped and brutalised opponents of the regime at home and abroad for 45 years. They are blacklisted as a foreign terrorist organisation in America, and Roberta Metsola, the President of the European Parliament, and a huge majority of EU lawmakers, have called for their blacklisting in Europe.

They brutally repressed the nationwide insurgence in 2022, killing more than 750 innocent protesters, including many women and children, and arresting over 30,000. During all these public protests, support for Reza Pahlavi has been non-existent. Indeed, the would-be ‘King’ has remained largely invisible in opposition circles for the past 45 years. For him to even suggest that there might be a role for the IRGC in a future Iran is an outrageous indication of the total illegitimacy of the monarchy.

Opposition risk their lives daily

Reza Pahlavi and his dwindling bunch of supporters are also naively playing the role of useful idiots for the mullahs. Keen to spread confusion through the ranks of the protesters, millions of whom have called for the overthrow of the theocratic regime, the mullahs have seized on the idea of the return of the monarchy as a way of alarming the people and creating difficulties for the PMOI/MEK opposition movement and their burgeoning resistance units, which have guided and coordinated opposition to the theocratic regime from the outset.

Threats, lies, warmongering, deploying terror gangs abroad and crushing dissent at home, are the hallmarks of this oppressive regime that massacred over 33,000 political prisoners, mostly supporters of the MEK, in 1988 alone. The courageous protesters and their resistance units, led from the start by extraordinary women like Maryam Rajavi, who risk their lives daily by demanding the overthrow of the mullahs, deserve the unequivocal backing of the West.

The EU and UK must now follow America’s lead by blacklisting the IRGC and indicting the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, his executioner president Ebrahim Raisi, and all the other regime tyrants, for human rights abuse and crimes against humanity. The time for weakness and appeasement is over. Only the overthrow of this tyrannical regime will avert a nuclear disaster and restore peace, justice and democracy to the Iranian people and the wider Middle East. A naked emperor in the shape of Reza Pahlavi is an amusing fairy tale fit only for children.

Struan Stevenson, a former member of the European Parliament, is the coordinator of the Campaign for Iran Change and chair of the In Search of Justice committee on the protection of political freedoms in Iran. His latest book is entitled Dictatorship and Revolution. Iran – A Contemporary History.