Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance (NCRI)

Twenty-six years ago, in its plenary session on August 27, 1993, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the democratic coalition of Iranian opposition organizations and prominent personalities, elected Mrs. Maryam Rajavi as the President-elect for the transitional period after the mullahs’ overthrow.

In a statement on October 22, 1993, the Iranian Resistance’s Leader Massoud Rajavi announced the NCRI’s historic decision. “This decision is proof of the political maturity of the only democratic political alternative of the clerical regime. Maryam Rajavi embodies the ideals of the majority of Iranians in their struggle for freedom, emancipation, economic development, peace, and peaceful coexistence,” Mr. Rajavi said.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)
elected Mrs. Maryam Rajavi as the President-elect for the transitional period after the mullahs’ overthrow

Who is Maryam Rajavi?

Maryam Rajavi was born into a middle-class family in Tehran. One of her brothers, Mahmoud, a veteran member of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK), was a political prisoner during the Shah’s regime. Her older sister Narges was murdered by the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, in 1975. Her younger sister, Massoumeh, an industrial engineering student, was arrested by the clerical regime in 1982. Pregnant at the time, she was ultimately hanged after undergoing brutal torture. Rajavi joined the MEK in the 1970s. Following the 1979 anti-monarchic revolution, she was a candidate in the first parliamentary elections in Iran in 1980.   Rajavi received over a quarter of million votes. Due to widespread fraud and rigging, however, none of the opposition candidates made it into Parliament.

Maryam Rajavi’s platform

Rajavi has announced a Ten-point Plan for the future of Iran that calls for the establishment of a democratic republic based on the separation of religion and state and guarantees religious, ethnic and gender equality.   Her plan advocates a non-nuclear Iran that will coexist peacefully with its neighbors.

Mrs. Rajavi’s plan has garnered widespread bi-partisan support across the globe, establishing the NCRI as the sole democratic alternative to the mullahs’ dictatorship.

Staff writer