Mohammad-bagher Ghalibaf pushes five requests in May 6 audio message
Mohammad-bagher ghalibaf resurfaced on May 6 with an audio message that laid out five requests for Iranians at home and abroad. The Parliament Speaker cast the moment as one of urgency, saying Iran was engaged in “one of the biggest wars in Iran’s contemporary history.”
His appeal reached beyond rhetoric. Ghalibaf called saving and reduced consumption “the missile the people can fire at the heart of the enemy,” and urged Iranians abroad to contribute ideas and resources to help manage wartime economic pressures.
Ghalibaf’s five requests
Ghalibaf used the message to push a practical civic program rather than a military one. He urged the revival of mutual-aid networks similar to those formed during the COVID-19 pandemic, asked the Basij militia to return to what he described as its “historic role as a neighborhood-based problem-solving force helping citizens navigate daily hardships,” and told expatriates not to wait for official outreach but to “force officials” to use their capabilities.
Those requests point to the strain he wants households, volunteers, and state-linked networks to absorb. The call to save and consume less was the clearest day-to-day instruction in the message, while the appeal to professionals abroad widened the audience to Iranians outside the country who may still have skills, capital, or contacts that Tehran wants to tap.
After the 12-day war
Ghalibaf rose to prominence during the 12-day war with Israel and the United States in 2025, then headed Iran’s delegation in the Islamabad talks with the United States after Ali Khamenei’s death. Hardline critics accused him of weakness in negotiations and insufficient resistance to Western pressure, and he largely retreated from public view before gradually re-emerging.
That sequence left him in a narrower political lane than before, even as he remained one of the state’s highest-profile figures. Former government spokesman Ali Rabiei and centrist politician Mohammad Atrianfar have argued that the state must first reconcile with its own citizens before it can stabilize the country externally, a view that fits the tone of Ghalibaf’s new public appeal.
Iran’s internal pressure
Ghalibaf’s message also landed against a background of broader calls from establishment figures for the government to repair its relationship with the public after months of unrest, war and economic pressure. Repeated remarks by Donald Trump about regime change reinforced speculation abroad that Ghalibaf might become the face of a post-Khamenei transition, but his May 6 message stayed focused on mobilizing people already inside and outside Iran.
For readers following Iran’s internal balance of power, the immediate takeaway is that Ghalibaf is not speaking as a bystander. He is trying to turn wartime restraint, local mutual aid, and diaspora expertise into political capital, and his next test is whether the people he addressed treat those five requests as a program or as another speech from a senior official under pressure.
