MEK’s shadow in European Parliament

While former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were heaping praise on the Mojahedin-e Khalq (the People’s Mojahedin) at the group’s annual gathering in Paris in early July, the controversial and aging exiled Iranian opposition group was making similar advances in nearby Brussels.

The conservative Spanish politician Javier Zarzalejos, a member of the European People’s Party (EPP), the main center-right group in the European Parliament, was elected chair of the EP’s powerful Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE). LIBE is one of the most influential bodies in the assembly as it shapes the EU’s legislation in such sensitive areas as migration, counterterrorism, and foreign interference, among others.

What is less well known is that in the outgoing legislature (2019-2024), Zarzalejos served as the chair of the Friends of Free Iran (FoFI), a cross-party grouping of parliamentarians who support the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the MEK’s umbrella organization. Zarzalejos is also the director of the neoconservative Madrid-based Foundation for Analysis and Social Studies (FAES), a think tank closely linked to former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar.

FoFI does not appear to have a website. On its X profile, it claims to enjoy “an active support of many MEPs from all political groups,” yet it wouldn’t disclose the list of its members. In fact, the group’s activities suggest that platforming NCRI leader Maryam Rajavi in Brussels and Strasbourg may be the only reason for its existence.

These pro-MEK activities, consisting of calls for regime change in Iran and promotion of NCRI/MEK as the legitimate alternative to the current government led Tehran to place FoFi, Zarzalejos, and a few other associated parliamentarians on its sanctions list in October 2022. In retaliation, the European Parliament declared that it won’t engage any longer with the “Iranian authorities.”

The MEK, described by a range of expert observers from the State Department to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute as “cult-like” or a “cult” centered around Rajavi and her late husband, has a long history of terrorist activity directed at westerners in Iran such that it earned a place on the U.S. and EU lists of terrorist organizations.

That the MEK was removed from those lists (in 2012 and in 2009 respectively) after a well-funded lobbying effort on its behalf, does not exonerate the group’s terrorist past, its bizarre internal practices, and human rights abuses that have been well-documented by institutions, including Human Rights Watch and the RAND Corporation, among others.

For someone like Zarzalejos to promote the MEK is even more peculiar given his close relationship to Aznar, one of the key promoters of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq where the group was known for its service to Saddam Hussein.

But the drive for regime change in Iran apparently trumps consistency: Aznar himself addressed the MEK convention in 2010, as did scores of other cheerleaders for the Iraq war, starting with former U.S. national security adviser John Bolton, who was fired by ex-president Donald Trump for excessive hawkishness.

Not only should the MEK’s past record be a red flag for any politician claiming to uphold civil liberties, but its present activities have invited increased scrutiny, particularly in the context of heightened concerns over illicit attempts at interference in democratic processes in the U.S. and EU.

Last year, the European Parliament adopted a report on foreign interference in which it noted that the “extra-EU funding of political activities and politicians in the EU puts at risk the integrity of the democratic functioning of the EU Member States and requires thorough investigations to hold those complicit accountable.”

In that context, the role of the NCRI/MEK was highlighted, in particular its funding of the far-right Spanish party Vox as revealed by the Spanish newspaper El Pais. That may well be only the tip of the iceberg, as the MEK is known to pay lavish sums without disclosing the sources of its funding to former and present Western politicians to burnish its credentials.

Interestingly, the report was authored by Sandra Kalniete from Latvia, a fellow conservative from Zarzalejos’ EPP. But that report apparently didn’t persuade him to cut his ties to the MEK. In January 2024, he chaired a meeting in the European Parliament with an ex-parliamentarian, Struan Stevenson, known for his staunch support of the NCRI, and a member of the NCRI’s so-called foreign affairs committee, Farzin Hashemi. That meeting featured the presentation of a “report” on Iran’s nefarious influence networks in Europe, which consisted of thoroughly debunked smears against a group of Western academics with Iranian backgrounds targeted for their work by Iran International and Semafor.

Three months later, Zarzalejos, without mentioning the NCRI/MEK explicitly, repeated the group’s talking points by characterizing Iran as an “apocalyptic theocracy” and urging the EU to support the opposition “instead of echoing the defamation campaigns originating in the Iranian theocracy.”

Given the opacity surrounding FoFI’s membership, it is not clear whether Zarzalejos remains its chair in the new legislature. There can be no reasonable doubt, however, that, as the examples above show, his links to the organization are recent enough to suggest a potential conflict of interest. On the one hand, Zarzalejos’ new position requires him to fight against malign foreign interference in the European Parliament. On the other hand, he has long been a champion of the NCRI/MEK which the EP itself has explicitly identified as an example of malign foreign interference.

That Zarzalejos’ election didn’t attract much attention may be explained by the fact that the media spotlight was focused on a far bigger scandal: the election of Charlie Weimers of the far-right Sweden Democrats — a party founded with neo-Nazi roots — as a vice-chair of the LIBE committee. Weimers happens to be another staunch foe of the Iranian government, and, like Zarzalejos, is on Tehran’s sanctions list, although he is known to support the son of the deposed shah, Reza Pahlavi, rather than Rajavi and the MEK.

That, however, may be a distinction without a difference: Pahlavi made clear his disdain for democracy by referring to it as an “inauthentic Western construct” at a recent national conservatism conference in Washington. What really matters is how European politicians endorsing undemocratic foreign figures like Rajavi and Pahlavi end up being in positions tasked with safeguarding civil liberties and democratic integrity in the EU.

Ultimately, such personalities are only likely to further highlight the irrelevance of the European Parliament in EU foreign policymaking. The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, is sending the European External Action Service political director and the EU’s chief nuclear negotiator Enrique Mora to the inauguration of newly-elected Iranian president Massoud Pezeshkian in Tehran early next month.

FoFI has predictably slammed the move but can’t stop it. There is an appetite in European capitals to at least test diplomacy with the new reformist administration in Tehran. That is not to say, however, that the activities of the MEK and its supporters in Western legislatures are completely harmless. To the contrary, they not only create a negative climate for diplomacy with Iran, but by embracing and normalizing non-transparent actors with destructive agendas, they also contribute to eroding the integrity of democratic systems.