“I’ll call you once I get changed,” I told my sister. “Got absolutely soaked.” She said she was sorry I’d got cold and wet. “It was water, not bullets,” I replied. She cried.

That afternoon in Munich, I had joined over one million Iranians and their supporters worldwide to remember the tens of thousands massacred by the Islamic Republic on 8 and 9 January this year. Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi had called on all who stand with Iranians to come together on a Global Action Day for Iran on Valentine’s Day, which also fell on the 40th day after the massacre. In Iranian culture, the 40th day after a death is a solemn threshold, when family and friends gather to mourn. This time, Iranians danced in defiance, sang instead of weeping, and told each other that freedom is closer than it has ever been.

In Munich alone, police estimated that 250,000 people had gathered to demand the fall of the regime. The following Monday, Iranian lawmaker Javad Hosseinikia called on the Foreign Ministry to expel Germany’s ambassador in Tehran in retaliation. The regime’s fury only confirmed that these demonstrations are working.

Since the January massacre, millions of Iranians in the diaspora have taken to the streets every weekend across the world, demanding democracy for the Iranian people. Videos sent to Iran International showed residents in cities across Iran chanting “Death to the dictator” and other anti-government slogans from rooftops and windows. Some chants referenced Reza Pahlavi directly, calling on him to return. As Iranians living in democratic societies, we are the voice of our people: saying what they cannot speak freely in the streets, because the regime has machine guns at the ready.

This uprising began when Tehran bazaar merchants flooded the streets on 28 December 2025 to protest the crushing corruption and economic pressures on ordinary Iranians. Within days, people across the country had joined them, rising up against 47 years of oppression. I will admit that, before the January massacre, I was not closely familiar with Reza Pahlavi’s work. But Iranians inside the country told me clearly: he is the leader they want to guide them towards a democratic future. He has since emerged as a unifying figure for Iran’s opposition. He is the person who brought an entire country together in January to stand up and demand their rights.

For Iran to be free, the world’s leaders must formally recognise Reza Pahlavi as the interim leader of the opposition. Germany has already taken a step in that direction, officially inviting Pahlavi to the Munich Security Conference while cancelling the invitations extended to Iranian regime officials. Pahlavi and his team have a comprehensive plan for democratic transition and reconstruction after the fall of this murderous regime – laid out in detail in the Iran Prosperity Project on his official website.

Our party’s response to the events in Iran hurts me deeply as a Lib Dem woman. Iranians are very disappointed at Ed Davey’s opposition to the Prime Minister’s decision to allow the use of UK bases for US strikes. No Iranian wants war, yet why are they throwing parties on their rooftops, cheering as Israeli and US bombs strike IRGC targets in their cities?

One Iranian living inside the country wrote on X: “the chance of being killed by masked armed men roaming the streets, or by gunmen standing on mosque rooftops behind machine guns, is far greater than the chance of dying in an airstrike. The real fear in Iran has never come from the sky. It has always come from the men the regime unleashes upon its own people.”

Each bomb that falls on an IRGC base is felt by Iranians as a blow struck on behalf of every person raped, tortured, or executed by the regime. Every Basij base destroyed in a strike is a measure of justice for the friends and families lost in decades of crackdowns. No one wants to see their country bombed. But for Iranians, the absence of any intervention has always meant the silencing of dissent, danger to political prisoners, mass executions, internet blackouts, and an ever-tightening grip of fear.

As a liberal democrat woman who grew up in an illiberal society, I am aggrieved by those who oppose an action purely because of who proposed it, without pausing to consider what their opposition means for the victims. That kind of politics is a luxury Iranians inside the country cannot afford. We owe them more than that.