Key Player: Mehdi Karroubi

Mehdi Karroubi was the other reformist candidate to run in the recent elections. Due to the fraudulent nature of the election, he supposedly only claimed a little over 300,000 or .85% of the votes for a man who received 17% of the vote in the 2005 elections. A joke after the election was that Karroubi would have received more votes if just his family and friends were counted. However he seriously did have more campaign volunteers than people who voted for him in the official tally. This low number of votes is perhaps the ultimate rebuke for a man who has often upset the hardliners in the regime. After the election, Karroubi has been able to work effectively with the other reformist candidate Mousavi to form a united block against the regime.

Karroubi was trained as a cleric and studied under Khomeini. He was imprisoned several times under the Shah for his political activism against his regime. After the Revolution, Karroubi ran the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee and the Martyr's Foundation along with later being elected to the Parliament. From 1989 to 1992, he served as Speaker of the Parliament and stood in opposition to many of the policies of then President Rafsanjani. He also help found and was the head the Association of Combatant Clerics which today is one of the main reformist clerical organizations.

Karroubi was again elected Speaker of the Parliament from 2000 to 2004 during a period where the reformists had a majority in the Parliament and reformist Khatami was President. Despite this control of the elected portions of the government, the reformist agenda was stopped by the intervention of the hardliners in particular those who controlled the Guardian Council which has veto power over the Parliament. Karroubi was criticized for not standing up to the hardliners when the reformists were in power and allowing the hardliners to eventually take complete control of the government.

In 2005, Karroubi ran for president in an election that saw voter apathy and dissatisfaction with the refromists' inablity to bring about real change to the regime. He did not make it into the run off round of the election where Ahmadinejad eventually won. Karroubi claimed unfair manipulation of the election by the regime, but no large spread opposition to Ahmadinejad's election emerged.

After the 2005 election, he created his own political party and newspaper called Etemad-e Melli. Karroubi once again presented himself as a candidate in the 2009 election even though Mousavi was the choice of most of the reform movement. He refused calls to step aside in defference to Mousavi, but it ultimately did not matter given the fradulent election results. After the eleciton, Karroubi and Mousavi quickly combined their resources to organize opposition to the eleciton of Ahmadinejad. They have effectively worked togheter and are frequently seen together at events to oppose the regime.

Karroubi is one of the highest political figures within the reform movement and is also a respected cleric. He has a progressive view when it comes to freedom, democracy, human rights, woman's rights, and minority rights in Islam. Although largely overshadowed by Mousavi in the recent movement against the regime, Karroubi remains an important figure in the reform movement and he will be in the middle of developments that come out of Iran.