General:
Mir-Hossein Mousavi (born 29 September 1941 pr 21 Sept ) is an Iranian politician, painter, architect who served as the fifth and last Prime Minister of
Iran from 1981 to 1989.
Mousavi is currently the president of the Iranian Academy of Arts.
He was the last prime minister in
Iran before the constitutional changes which removed the post of prime minister. Before that, he was the Minister of Foreign Affairs. He is currently the president of the Iranian Academy of Arts.
He is also a member of the
Expediency Discernment Council and the High Council of Cultural Revolution, but he has not been participating in their meetings for a long time which is interpreted by political analysts and commentators as a sign of his disapproval.
Mousavi holds a Masters degree in
Architecture from
Shahid Beheshti University. In the early years of the revolution,
Mousavi was the editor-in-chief of the official newspaper of the
Islamic Republic Party, the Jomhouri-e Eslami (Islamic Republic) newspaper.
On March 9, 2009 he announced his bid to run in the 2009 Iranian Presidential Election, which has been since welcomed by some Iranians who still recall his time as Prime Minister.
He has stated that his main goals are to institutionalise social justice, equality and fairness, freedom of expression, rooting out
corruption as well as to speed up
Iran's pending process of privatization and thus move
Iran away from what he calls "an alms-based economy" .Presidential hopeful
Mousavi is posing a pro-reform challenge to the country's hard-line establishment and the current ultra-conservative
president Ahmadinejad and has often criticized his economic mismanagement, stating that when
Iran "was making profits from
high oil prices, had he (
Ahmadinejad) ever considered a situation when prices would fall?".
Some Iranian reformers, who favor improving ties with the West and loosening restrictions at home, see
Mousavi's candidacy as a strong opportunity to unseat the current hard-line President
Ahmadinejad, as he has lost popularity even among conservatives because of his handling of the faltering economy,
evaporation of civil liberties and the disastrous state of the
foreign policy, as some Iranians believe that his tough anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli rhetoric has worsened
Iran's isolation and standing in the world.
On March 16 2009, former Iranian President Khatami dropped out of the 2009 Iranian Presidential Election in support of
Mir-Hossein Mousavi."