Iran’s former President and a notable reformist figure in the country called on Iranian to participate in the election and said, “the more people lose their hope for reform, the more regime-change mentality grows.”
In a meeting with Iranian engineers’ society on Saturday, Khatami asked the reformists to amend a strategy for “convincing people to participate in the election.”
Iran is expecting both parliamentary election and later Presidential election in 2021. Iranian reformists have been desperately trying to win back citizen’s trust and convince them to vote.
Earlier in March, Khatami warned the reformist members of parliament of the “failure of reform” in the Islamic Republic and noted that “inviting people to take part in the future elections is a difficult job to do.”
Khatami was Iran’s president for the years 1997 to 2005.
The widespread anti-regime protests in the December of 2017 across Iran worried Iranian officials especially the reformists. People in more than 80 Iranian cities and towns took the streets and demanded their basic rights, while criticizing the regime for its political, social and economic failures.
Chanting slogans such as “Reformist, Fundamentalist, the game is over,” the protesters expressed their angers of both sides and the entire political system in Iran.
More than 200 people, who participated in the mass protests, were killed or detained by the reformist government of Hassan Rouhani.
Mohsen Rahami, the head of Reformists’ Strategic Committee stated on Saturday that this committee is trying to reduce the differences between fundamentalists and reformists.
According to Rahami, one of the agenda of the committee is to “motivating people to vote.”
Reformist movement in Iran began with the election of Khatami in 1997 as the president, and spread the hope of change among Iranians at that time.
