Iran’s former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi has issued a rare and sharply worded appeal urging the country’s clerical leadership to relinquish power following what he described as a grave crime committed during the recent crackdown on nationwide protests. In a statement released on Thursday by his Kalame media outlet, Mousavi conveyed that large sections of Iranian society had clearly rejected the current political system and no longer trusted the leadership’s narrative. He characterized the suppression of demonstrations as a dark and irreversible moment in Iran’s national history, arguing that the scale and severity of the violence marked a profound betrayal of the people. Mousavi, who has been under house arrest since 2011, linked the present unrest to long-standing grievances rooted in the disputed 2009 presidential election, when he maintained that his victory over then-incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been overturned, triggering the mass Green Movement protests.
Green Movement Legacy and Constitutional Referendum Call Shape Mousavi’s Latest Intervention
According to the same Kalame statement, Mousavi warned that continued repression would leave Iranians with no alternative but to return to the streets, while asserting that security forces would eventually refuse to bear responsibility for suppressing popular demands. He urged authorities to abandon the use of force and allow the nation to determine its own political future, emphasizing that sovereignty should rest with the people rather than coercive power. Mousavi also called for a constitutional referendum as a peaceful path forward, while explicitly opposing any form of foreign intervention, even as Washington has publicly stated it has not ruled out military options in response to the crackdown. Human rights organizations have verified thousands of deaths linked to the security response, while cautioning that the true toll could be far higher. Mousavi’s intervention carries particular historical weight: he served as prime minister from 1981 to 1989 under then-president Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, later Iran’s supreme leader, and was one of the few non-clerics to hold senior power in the 1980s. Long viewed as a more moderate figure within the Islamic Republic, Mousavi was the country’s last prime minister before the post was abolished following Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s death, making his renewed call for systemic change a significant moment in Iran’s ongoing political crisis.