Rudy Giuliani: Maryam Rajavi Has Proven She Is Qualified to Lead Iran’s Democratic Transition

Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York City, said that Iran now stands on the threshold of historic change and that the Iranian people are no longer prepared to tolerate a regime that has spent more than four decades suppressing its citizens, carrying out executions, fueling regional conflicts, and undermining peace.

Speaking at a major gathering of Free Iranians in Rome under the banner “No to Executions, Yes to a Democratic Republic,” Giuliani said repeated experience has demonstrated the failure of unconditional negotiations with Iran’s ruling theocracy. Every round of talks, he argued, has given the regime additional time to intensify repression at home and expand its instruments of terrorism and intimidation abroad.

Giuliani stressed that removing the regime is not enough by itself. Iran also requires an organized and democratic alternative capable of managing the transition, preventing chaos, and ensuring that the institutions of repression do not regain power through the back door.

He said the National Council of Resistance of Iran and the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran represent the organized force with the political experience, nationwide structure, and social support required to carry out such a transition.

Giuliani rejected efforts to portray the former Shah’s son as an alternative for Iran, describing them as an attempt to repeat the past. The Iranian people, he said, suffered first under the Shah’s dictatorship and later under the mullahs’ tyranny. They do not want to move from one dictatorship back to another; they seek a democratic republic founded on free elections and popular sovereignty.

By contrast, Giuliani said Maryam Rajavi has demonstrated over decades of struggle that she is qualified to guide Iran through a transition to freedom and democracy. She has faced threats, assassination plots, and intense political pressure, while remaining steadfast in defending the dignity of the Iranian people and their right to choose their own future.

He emphasized that Rajavi is not seeking personal wealth or permanent power. Her objective is to ensure an orderly and peaceful transition in which the Iranian people ultimately decide their country’s future through free and fair elections.

Giuliani described Rajavi’s Ten-Point Plan as a clear roadmap for Iran’s future. It calls for a republic based on universal suffrage, the separation of religion and state, full equality between women and men, an independent judiciary, the abolition of the death penalty, respect for the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, and a non-nuclear Iran living in peace with its neighbors.

He said the existence of an experienced political leadership, a transitional program, and trained personnel capable of maintaining schools, hospitals, public services, and security after the regime’s fall is essential until the Iranian people elect their new representatives and government.

Giuliani recalled the long history of the MEK’s struggle against both the Shah’s dictatorship and the clerical regime. He said its members and supporters have paid a heavy price for defending freedom, gender equality, free elections, and human dignity. They have faced shootings in the streets and executions in prisons, yet the authorities have failed to eliminate their resistance or their roots within Iranian society.

The protests that have swept Iran in recent years, he added, show that the Iranian people’s fundamental demands have not changed: freedom, dignity, the right to choose their leaders, and an end to repression and discrimination. The regime, however, has no answer to these demands other than bullets, imprisonment, and the gallows.

Giuliani welcomed Britain’s decision to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, describing the IRGC as the backbone of domestic repression and the export of terrorism and war across the region. He urged European governments and the United States to target its financial and political networks and recognize the Iranian people’s right to resist this repressive institution.

He also pointed to the statement signed by more than 120 prominent Arab figures condemning the Iranian regime’s regional interference and aggression. This initiative, he said, reflects growing recognition across the Arab world that lasting peace cannot be achieved while the clerical regime uses the IRGC and proxy militias to destabilize neighboring countries.

Giuliani concluded that the regime’s downfall is inevitable and that the essential task is to ensure that power passes to the Iranian people—not to another faction of the ruling establishment and not back to a former dictatorship.

“Maryam Rajavi has proven her ability to lead this transition,” he said. “I look forward to the day when we all meet in a free Tehran, in a democratic republic chosen by the Iranian people themselves.”