A global summit convened in Paris by the National Council of Resistance of Iran has been told by its President-elect, Maryam Rajavi, that the mullahs’ dictatorship in Tehran is teetering on the brink of collapse. In a speech relayed to a mass demonstration in the centre of Paris, she predicted the imminent downfall of religious fascism in her country, writes Political Editor Nick Powell.

Iranian exiles gathered in Paris determined to salute the bravery of the internal resistance in their homeland, often led by young women and girls. The National Council of Resistance of Iran also wanted to show itself ready to bring freedom and democracy to a country that has endured more than forty years of the mullahs’ rule, preceded by the equally ruthless dictatorship of the Shah.

The Council’s President-elect, Maryam Rajavi, told the vast crowd that foreign governments must stop appeasing the mullahs and in effect supporting them. The Iranian people would themselves liberate their country. “As you disperse from here”, she said, “please relay to every Iranian you meet that you have found the way. Enlighten them that the answer resides in revolution”.

To those who questioned how it was possible to overthrow the rule of what she called “this bloodthirsty leviathan”, the President-elect said that the response was clear: “through unrelenting resistance, a struggle a hundredfold fiercer, the mobilisation of resistance units, a revolt and the Army of Freedom”.

The crowd was also addressed by the MEP and former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, one of 110 political leaders who have called for a fundamental change in Western policy towards Iran. He decried the pointless search for moderates to negotiate with in Tehran. “There are no moderates in the mullahs’ regime, who kill and execute”, he said, “who hang their own sons and daughters”.

At a conference on the eve of the summit and rally, Guy Verhofstadt’s former colleague in the European Parliament, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, observed that although there was majority support in the parliament for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the European Council and the Commission had “made the lives of the mullahs easy”.

He said their policy had been dominated by “two mirages”, the illusion that there are moderates in the regime to engage with and the illusion that it is possible to negotiate with them. This approach had failed for decades and yet continued year after year.

Dr Vidal-Quadras was especially scathing about all four successive High Representatives for Foreign Affairs, including the present one, his fellow Spaniard and Catalan, Josep Borrell. They had all been “deaf and blind to the evidence”, he said, due to a policy that refused to take risks. “To defeat a tyranny is impossible without risk”, he warned, “they fail to realise that they are increasing risk every year”.

From Finland, Kimmo Sasi, the former president of the Nordic Council, said that although it was quite right for the European Union to think of itself as a moral superpower, that sometimes led to wishful thinking. The Iranian regime exports military power that threatens Europe and brings terrorism to European soil, he argued, as well as presenting a potential nuclear threat. “It cannot be tolerated”, he said.

The former Foreign Minister of Lithuania, Audronius Ažubalis, reflected on his own experience of living under Soviet occupation. He recalled that most support for the Lithuanian cause came from the United States, not Europe with its trade with the USSR. Even now with Ukraine, he observed that greediness sometimes got in the way of ceasing trade with Russia. “The greed EU” was sapping its own moral strength, he said.

It was an unflattering portrayal of European foreign policy reinforced by the remarks of Marc Short, chief of staff to Vice-President Mike Pence during Donald Trump’s Republican administration in the United States. He blamed Presidents Obama and Biden for attempting to appease the mullahs through a nuclear deal “that gave them a path to nuclear weapons” but recalled European leaders calling the Trump White House, begging the President not to take the United States out of the deal.

Moral clarity was offered by the former Democratic candidate for Vice-President of the United States, Senator Joe Lieberman. He dismissed the claims of the regime in Tehran that there was no alternative to negotiating with it as “the argument that brought Chamberlain to Munich”.

“The United States can never acknowledge that there is no alternative to a totalitarian government”, he continued, “their supplying weapons to the Russians has awakened the world to their evil, especially in Europe”.

Senator Lieberman said the National Council of Resistance of Iran had earned the right to lead the transition once the mullahs are overthrown, due to its “singleminded belief in a democratic Iran since the time of the Shah”. He praised Maryam Rajavi as “an extraordinary leader, a woman of courage, a woman of principle”, calling her “a woman more ready than anyone else to lead the people to freedom in Iran”.

The Senator looked forward to a summit in the not-too-distant future when “we will hold this event in freedom and celebration in the city of Tehran”.

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