The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a coalition of dissident groups founded in 1981, which advocates for the overthrow of the Islamic regime, launched a new political offensive at the European Parliament on Wednesday. NCRI demands that the European Union definitively break with Tehran following the latest wave of executions of opposition figures and protesters in Iran.
NCRI’s leader, Maryam Rajavi, called for tougher sanctions, the closure of Iranian embassies in Europe, and for Brussels to stop treating the Iranian regime as an unavoidable interlocutor. “The silence of European leaders and member states in the face of this wave of executions is unjustifiable,” she said.
Rajavi stated that at least 16 political prisoners have been executed in the past month, including eight members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK) and several young people who had taken part in the January uprising. According to the NCRI, eleven more prisoners are facing imminent execution.
Many of those executed had actively participated in the protests. That makes them priority targets for the regime, which is trying to prevent the re-emergence of a structure capable of leading a new uprising or a future political transition.
The opposition argues that the Iranian government fears an internal explosion more than a foreign intervention. “The main war is the one between the Iranian people and the religious dictatorship,” Rajavi said in Brussels.
The event at Parliament was accompanied by a demonstration outside the European Parliament building, involving around 300 NCRI supporters. The protest, held just a few metres from Luxembourg Square, sought to increase pressure on the European institutions and allowed the movement to display a mobilising capacity that stands out among Iranian opposition groups in Europe.
The NCRI is also trying to convince the EU that there is an organised alternative capable of avoiding the scenario most feared by several European capitals: the chaos that could follow a possible collapse of the regime. Rajavi defended a transition based on a provisional government, elections within six months, and the separation of religion and state.
Shahin Gobadi, the movement’s spokesman, said to europeanconservative.com that the regime “has never been so weak or so fragmented.” According to Gobadi, the executions show that Tehran fears a new uprising once the war ends. “They think that by killing dissidents they will prevent another revolt, but in vain,” he said.
The NCRI’s pressure campaign comes, however, at a moment when the EU remains deeply divided over Iran. That lack of unity was already visible during the war, when some governments defended a much harder line, under pressure from Israel and the United States, while others insisted on avoiding direct confrontation.
The result so far has been an ambiguous position: Brussels condemns the repression but avoids taking definitive measures.