From revolutionaries to royalists? Why some of Iran's former leftists now back Reza Pahlavi

Nearly half a century after the Islamic revolution that overthrew Iran’s monarchy, a quiet shift has taken place among some of its former supporters.

They were once the young revolutionaries of 1979 – leftists, activists, and political prisoners – shaped by the ideological certainties of their time. They spoke in the language of social justice and anti-imperial struggle, convinced they were dismantling a system that could not be reformed. For many, the Shah’s Iran was deeply flawed, and even the idea of monarchy went against their fundamental beliefs.

Some paid for those beliefs with years in prison. Others would later be imprisoned again, this time by the Islamic Republic they had helped bring to power.

Today, a number of those same figures are arriving at a conclusion that would once have seemed unthinkable: that Iran’s future may, in part, rest with the very dynasty they helped bring down.

For Iraj Mesdaghi, that conclusion has been shaped by a lifetime that mirrors the contradictions of modern Iran. Born in Tehran in 1960, he became politically active as a teenager, traveling to the United States to work with the Confederation of Iranian Students before returning in the wake of the revolution. Within a few years, he found himself imprisoned – first in Ghezel Hesar, then in Evin and Gohardasht – spending more than a decade behind bars between 1981 and 1991.

He survived the 1988 mass executions of political prisoners, one of the Islamic Republic’s darkest chapters, and would later document those years in dozens of books, becoming one of the most prominent chroniclers of the regime’s abuses. After his release, he fled Iran, eventually settling in Sweden, where he continued his work with international institutions, including the UN Human Rights Council, the International Labor Organization, and the European Parliament.

His political journey has been no less dramatic. Once aligned with the communist Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), he later became one of its fiercest critics. Last week, he was appointed by Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi to serve on a Transitional Justice Regulations Drafting Committee, alongside Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi.

For Mesdaghi, the shift resists easy ideological categorization.

“I’m not a Republican, I’m not a monarchist,” he told The Jerusalem Post. “This is not important for me. What is important for me is how we want to rebuild Iran.”

To understand how figures like Mesdaghi arrived at this point, one must return to the intellectual climate of the 1970s and a world shaped by Iran’s internal dynamics and the broader currents of the Cold War.

Across universities and political circles, the dominant frameworks were ideological. Politics was capitalism versus socialism, imperialism versus resistance. In that environment, the shah’s close alignment with the United States, and his quiet but significant ties to Israel, placed him firmly on the wrong side of history in the eyes of many left-leaning activists, who followed the Soviet Union’s support of Arab countries and anti-US sentiment.

Mahshid Sepehri, who became politically active in that era, looks back on her own participation with a severity that surprises even now.

“If I were to describe my participation in the 1979 Islamic Revolution in one sentence, I would call it pure ignorance,” she reminisced.

Sepehri is specific about what that ignorance entailed. It was not only a failure to grasp Khomeini’s worldview, but a deeper blindness to what the revolution would ultimately unleash, and to what had already been achieved under the Pahlavis.

“My generation,” she said, “through our devastating mistakes in 1979, played a destructive role in the ruin of our homeland.”

Hossein Maleki, who spent years as a political prisoner, frames the same failure in more analytical terms. Looking back, he described a political culture shaped by ideological rigidity and informational imbalance.

“The dominant political discourse was one of social justice, framed through the concepts of ‘Left’ and ‘Right,’” he explained. “Our knowledge and information about the performance of the previous government were largely one-sided.”

The result was a worldview that left little room for nuance, let alone reform. “The 1979 revolution was, in reality, the result of ideology dominating politics.”

One of the more uncomfortable conclusions emerging from these reflections concerns the relationship between the Left and political Islam in the years leading up to 1979.

At the time, the alliance appeared tactical. Secular leftists, Islamists, and nationalists were united in opposition to the shah, even if their long-term visions diverged sharply. But the common ground they found blurred those differences in ways that would later prove catastrophic.

Sepehri now sees that alignment as more than incidental.

“The Left, even at that time, was mainly focused on fighting the United States and Israel,” she recalled. “As a result, their positions were fully aligned with those of the Islamic regime.”

That convergence, whether intentional or not, gave political Islam a legitimacy and a coalition it might otherwise have struggled to assemble.

Once in power, the Islamic Republic moved quickly to eliminate its former allies. Leftist movements were dismantled, activists imprisoned, and thousands executed, many of them the very revolutionaries who had helped bring the system into being.

Mesdaghi was among those. His initial political alignment with the MEK was, he now acknowledges, less a matter of conviction than of circumstance.

“At that time, I supported the mujahideen politically because there was no other option,” he said.

That conclusion would shape his eventual break with the organization and with the ideological frameworks that had once guided him.

Few organizations embody the contradictions of Iran’s revolutionary era more fully than the Mujahedin-e Khalq.

Founded in the 1960s, the group blended elements of Marxism with Islamist ideology, presenting itself as a revolutionary force against both the shah and Western influence. During the 1979 revolution, it formed part of the broader coalition opposing the monarchy, before quickly falling out with Khomeini’s regime.

What followed was a violent and controversial trajectory. The MEK carried out attacks inside Iran, later aligning itself with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War in a move that permanently damaged its standing among ordinary Iranians. Over time, it evolved into a highly centralized organization, often described by critics as cultlike, with a rigid ideological structure and opaque leadership.

For Mesdaghi, who once supported the group, the MEK now represents a continuation of the very pathology he spent decades escaping.

“The mujahideen are the most dangerous group,” he said. “They are also political Islam.”

His criticism is direct: he accuses the organization of antisemitism and ideological extremism rooted in the same absolutism that defined the Islamic Republic’s own early years.

“I know them very well,” he said.

For Mesdaghi and others who have arrived at similar conclusions, the MEK is a mirror of the Islamic Republic.

In the decades since the revolution, Iran has experienced repeated waves of protest, each exposing the depth of public dissatisfaction, each ultimately falling short.

From the student protests of 1999 to the Green Movement of 2009 and the more recent uprisings of 2019 and 2022, the pattern has remained consistent: widespread mobilization, followed by decisive repression. The Green Movement, despite its scale, remained tethered to the system it sought to reform. Later protests were more radical but also more fragmented, lacking coordinating leadership or a clear political horizon.

“The people alone could not overthrow the regime,” Maleki observed to the Post, “yet the regime could not permanently silence the population.”

The result is a stalemate, and one sustained by the absence of a unifying figure capable of translating widespread dissatisfaction into political direction. “Subsequent movements failed for the same reason: the absence of a recognized leadership.”

Against that backdrop, some former revolutionaries have begun to reassess the system they once opposed. This is not, they insist, about romanticizing a vanished era. It is about recognizing that the alternative they helped create proved far more destructive than the one they tore down.

Sepehri acknowledged the monarchy’s shortcomings freely but argued that it may have been capable of evolving. “Mohammad Reza Shah made mistakes and certainly was not without flaws. But we could have given that system the chance to reform.”

Maleki took a similar view, pointing to the reforms already underway before 1979. Those changes, he argued, “could well have evolved into political reforms” – had the revolutionary rupture not foreclosed the path entirely.

Such assessments remain contested, particularly among those who continue to view the shah’s rule as inherently authoritarian. But for this group of former activists, the focus is less on rehabilitating the past than on understanding how their own assumptions produced the outcome they got.

It is within this context of disillusionment with the past, exhaustion with the present, and a persistent vacuum of opposition that Reza Pahlavi has emerged as a potential focal point.

Pahlavi has consistently maintained that the form of Iran’s future government should be determined by the Iranian people through a referendum, a position that allows him to act as a unifying figure without predetermining the outcome, and his Iran Prosperity Project is the only noticeable alternative plan for Iran that has been put forward.

“I will vote for a system whose constitution is based on human rights, democracy, and territorial integrity,” Sepehri said. The form, she added, is secondary to those foundations.

Maleki pointed to Pahlavi’s ability to communicate across different segments of Iranian society – between the political elites of the diaspora and the broader public in the country – as a quality conspicuously absent from the opposition landscape.

“He’s a national asset who can bring different segments of society together,” he stated.

Mesdaghi, drawing on decades of experience observing Iran from prison cells to international institutions, makes the case in starker terms. “Who can bring stability and peace?” he asked rhetorically. “Reza Pahlavi and his program.”

The search for alternatives has also prompted a harder look among the opposition. Years of ideological division, internal rivalries, and strategic missteps have eroded public trust in many established groups. The MEK, once a significant force, is now widely dismissed. Broader opposition movements, Maleki argued, remain trapped in the language and assumptions of the 1970s, but this conversation resonates little with younger generations that have known only life under the Islamic Republic.

For younger Iranians, the shah is a historical reference point rather than anything in their living memory. Their political identity has been shaped entirely by decades under the Islamic Republic – by economic hardship, social restrictions, and repeated cycles of protest and repression. And yet it is their voices that are increasingly heard chanting Pahlavi’s name at demonstrations inside Iran.

Mesdaghi pointed to reports suggesting the scale of this support is far larger than diaspora politics might suggest.

“In rural areas, 90% of people support Reza Pahlavi, and in cities around 80%,” he told the Post.

Whether or not those figures are precise, the broader trend he described is visible in other ways. Even within families with deep ties to leftist movements, the shift is evident. “Young people whose parents were leftists are sometimes even stronger supporters of Pahlavi,” he said.

The current conflict between Israel and Iran has added a new and uncertain dimension to this evolving situation.

For decades, the Islamic Republic has maintained its position through a combination of internal control and external confrontation. Now, with direct military pressure and heightened regional tensions, some opposition figures believe the balance may be shifting in ways it has not shifted before.

Maleki described the situation as a potential break in the long-standing stalemate.

“In such a situation, the entry of a third force could break this stalemate,” he said, suggesting that external pressure could create openings that internal protest alone has repeatedly failed to generate.

Sepehri goes further, making a case that would have been almost impossible to voice in the political climate of 1979.

“The people of my country have the support of the United States and Israel to confront this regime,” she explained.

This alignment, for her generation of former leftists, represents a total inversion of the ideals through which they once understood the world. The country they once fought to liberate from American and Israeli influence is now, in her view, looking to those same actors for support against a far more immediate threat.

Not all Iranians share this outlook. Skepticism toward Pahlavi persists, particularly among those who fear a return to concentrated power or who question whether any single figure can unify a deeply divided opposition. Even among supporters, there is clear-eyed recognition that the challenges of transition will be immense.

But for those who have made this ideological journey from revolutionary leftism to cautious alignment with the shah’s son, the debate is about the future of Iran and who can best provide that future, rather than about Left or Right, monarchist or republican.

“What is important for me,” Mesdaghi stated to the Post, returning to the question he has spent a lifetime trying to answer, “is how we want to rebuild Iran.”

Among some of those who once fought to end the Pahlavi legacy, he now represents their best hopes.