Less than two months after the “ceasefire” between Iran and Israel, on August 17 Iran’s Reform Front (including more than 30 political party and groups) released a statement titled “National Reconciliation: A Golden Opportunity for Change and a Return to the People,” offering immediate and practical steps for structural reforms in both domestic and foreign policy.
The Reform Front’s statement came after several other statements and articles by prominent reformist political figures — including former president Hassan Rouhani, former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, and Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Iran’s only prime minister during the Iran–Iraq war before president system. In their own ways, they called for changing the “governing system,” and mentioned creating a constituent assembly, amending the constitution, and holding a referendum. They argued that “it is time for a paradigm shift for Iran,” and that these changes should start from within the state.
The Reform Front’s statement was published about one month after the coalition’s third meeting with centrist President Masoud Pezeshkian.
Many outside Iran may not know this reform front well. They are not opposition in the classic sense. Rather, they are regime insiders—architects of the Islamic Republic who helped build many of its institutions after 1979, including laws that harmed women, workers, and dissidents in the 1980s. And yet, from inside the system, they now publish a list of demands that reads like an X-ray of a country in deep crisis. That paradox is exactly why this text matters for a foreign reader.
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The statement calls for structural reform, not small cosmetic changes. It starts with a general amnesty: free all political and conscience prisoners, end the house arrest of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and her wife, Zahra Rahnavard, lift the political bans on former president Mohammad Khatami, and stop the repression of peaceful critics. It asks for a new governing language focused on national development and dignity—bread, welfare, and public services—rather than endless ideological battles. It wants the “parallel institutions” to be dissolved and real authority returned to the elected government. It demands that military forces (IRGC) go back to the barracks and leave politics, the economy, and culture. Furthermore, it asks for a new approach to internal security, an end to the “insider/outsider” label, and a sharp reduction in the security gaze over everyday life. It calls for free media, reform of the state broadcaster, and the removal of censorship. It names legal equality for women as urgent, because half the society lives under systematic discrimination and violence. It says the economy must be taken out of the hands of oligarchs tied to the state and opened to fair competition and equal opportunity. Finally, it argues for foreign policy de-escalation: prevent the “snapback” of UN sanctions, lift current sanctions, accept intrusive nuclear monitoring in exchange for full relief, and normalize relations—including direct talks with the United States—while also supporting a two-state solution and a sovereign Palestine.
For people who do not follow Iran closely, these points translate to one simple truth: the state’s political, economic, and security architecture is blocking normal life. If you need an amnesty, that means prisons hold thousands for speech, organizing, or protest. If you need the army to return to the barracks, it means military and security institutions are running too much of politics and business. If you must “end parallel institutions,” it means bodies outside the reach of voters make the biggest decisions. If you must “remove censorship,” it means public debate is made impossible by design. If you must “change women’s laws,” it means inequality is written into the legal code. A reformist insider would not list these items unless the crisis is severe.
Here I must speak about how this picture disappears in the West. Right-wing propaganda reduces Iran to three words: nuclear, terror, proxy. When you look only through that lens, you miss the fight inside Iran for dignity and bread, for union rights and free classrooms, for women’s autonomy and basic rule of law—struggles that are happening daily all over the country. On the other side, parts of the Western left flatten our struggle into another file in their anti-imperialist cabinet. They see every strike, every student sit-in, every feminist march as a CIA or Mossad plot. This is convenient. It allows them to ignore the complexity and the real pain inflicted by a fascist state on its people. It also erases the agency of millions who resist from below—workers, teachers, students, minorities, and families of the imprisoned and executed.
I have seen how these frames work in European media rooms. Editors love simple binaries: “regime change” versus “stability,” “pro-America” versus “anti-America.” But the Reform Front’s list refuses the binary. These are not slogans for a Western audience. They are insider demands that expose the real structure: censorship, militarized economy, judicial punishment of dissent, gender discrimination, and a foreign policy that trades the people’s livelihood for ideology. In other words, the system’s own children are saying the house is on fire.
Does this make reformists heroes? No. Many reformists helped design the very house. In the 1980s and 1990s they backed or tolerated repressive laws against women and workers. During their time in office, they often compromised with unelected centers of power. They benefited from the same closed political market that today crushes seculars, republicans, and the radical left. Unions, independent student groups, and socialist currents have been jailed or pushed underground for decades. Secular republicans and other dissidents mostly work in exile or in small, risky networks inside. The reformists did little to open legal space for these forces when they had leverage.
And yet the significanceof this statement is not moral purity; it is political evidence. If even insiders now demand amnesty, end of house arrests, free media, rollback of the security state, and a retreat of the military from the economy, it shows how broad and undeniable the crisis of governance has become. It also shows something crucial for foreign readers: the push for change is native to Iran. It is not a gift from Washington or Tel Aviv, as the narrative espoused by Netanyahu purports. It grows from the experience of inflation, corruption, humiliation, and fear; from the grief of mothers; from classrooms closed by surveillance; from strikes answered by batons; from women forced by law to live as second-class citizens.
Still, among ordinary Iranians the response was muted. Years of disillusionment have left many skeptical of reformist promises. Some social media users praised the statement as overdue honesty; others pointed to reformists’ past complicity with the system and asked why they should be trusted now. Newspapers inside Iran noted that public reaction was weak because many people no longer believe change can come from within the system.
So what should a non-Iranian reader do with this? First, refuse propaganda from both sides. Do not reduce Iran to a nuclear file or a chessboard for great powers. Do not romanticize the state simply because it stands against the West. Second, read the list like a map of what is broken. Each point is a door: open it, and you will meet a living community—families of political prisoners, women’s rights defenders, independent journalists, oil and hospital workers, students and teachers. Third, measure any future step—not by geopolitics—but by whether it moves us toward those doors: freeing prisoners, ending censorship, securing women’s equality, shrinking the security state, and bringing the military back to professional boundaries.
I left Iran to keep writing. I do not ask you to choose my camp. I ask you to see our society with its own complexity and voices. The Reform Front’s statement is not the whole truth. But it is a clear signal from the heart of the regime: the system is in a deep crisis, and the people’s demands can no longer be hidden behind any propaganda, Eastern or Western, left or right.