The election of Mahnaz Maimanat (pictured) to lead the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran highlights more than three decades of continuous female leadership within one of Iran’s principal organised opposition movements. An important development has taken place within the Iranian democratic opposition. On 6 September, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), the principal organized component of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), elected Mahnaz Maimanat as its new Secretary-General, at the beginning of the organisation’s 62nd year.
The election took place through three successive rounds involving PMOI members in seven countries — France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Albania. In the first round, Maimanat received 56% of the votes, ahead of Badri Pourtabbakh and Narges Azdanlou. The position is for a two-year term and may be renewed by the PMOI’s Central Council. Born in Tehran in 1959, Maimanat has spent most of her adult life in the movement.
She became acquainted with the PMOI as a university student and participated in demonstrations against the Shah’s dictatorship. She joined the organization following the 1979 revolution and went on to assume a succession of senior responsibilities: she became a member of the Executive Committee in 1989, the Leadership Council in 1993, the Central Council in 2014, and co-Secretary-General in 2021. Her personal history also reflects the heavy price paid by many PMOI families under the clerical regime. Her mother, Akhtar Mowlavi, a teacher, was killed by the Revolutionary Guards in 1988.
One of her brothers, Massoud, was executed in Evin Prison at the age of 19 after months of imprisonment and torture. Another brother, Mahmoud, an architecture student, was executed during the 1988 massacre of political prisoners. The significance of the election, however, goes well beyond a change of office-holder. Mahnaz Maimanat is the tenth woman to serve as Secretary-General of the PMOI. Maryam Rajavi became the first woman to hold the organisation’s top leadership position in 1989, and for more than three decades every PMOI Secretary-General has been a woman.
Eight women succeeded Mrs Rajavi before Maimanat. This is particularly significant in the Iranian context. Within the PMOI, women’s leadership is not simply a matter of ceremonial representation or political imagery. Its female Secretaries-General have exercised real executive and organisational authority, often during extraordinarily difficult periods involving clandestine activity inside Iran, severe repression, imprisonment and executions, attacks on PMOI members, displacement from Iraq and the subsequent rebuilding of the organisation.
After assuming responsibility for leading the National Council of Resistance of Iran in 1993, Maryam Rajavi ceased to hold a formal organisational position within the PMOI. Nevertheless, she remains the most prominent political figure of the Iranian Resistance and, for many Iranians, particularly women, has become a symbol of resistance to religious fundamentalism and a pioneer of women’s equality and political leadership. This model of female leadership has also had important consequences inside Iran. Women have increasingly assumed leading responsibilities within the PMOI’s underground Resistance Units, which the movement says have played an active role in successive uprisings against the regime, including the nationwide protests of January 2026.
For young Iranian women confronting compulsory veiling, institutional discrimination and a political system that treats women as second-class citizens, the sight of women exercising genuine authority within an organised opposition movement carries considerable political and cultural significance. It also helps explain the intensity of the attacks directed against the PMOI’s leadership by the Iranian regime and, increasingly, by hardline monarchist circles. Both have devoted considerable efforts to portraying the PMOI, and particularly its female leadership, as illegitimate.
Yet the central issue is that the PMOI remains a highly organised democratic opposition movement with an extensive network inside Iran and therefore represents a serious challenge to the survival of the ruling theocracy. The election of its tenth female Secretary-General should therefore be viewed in a broader perspective. It represents more than three decades of continuous female leadership and constitutes a profound ideological and cultural challenge to Islamic fundamentalism: not simply women demanding equality, but women assuming responsibility, exercising authority and leading an organised struggle against a system built upon their discrimination and subordination.
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