About 200,000 people joined a demonstration against the Iranian government in Munich on Saturday, police said, as world leaders gathered nearby for a security conference.
The pro-monarchist protesters rallied on the German city’s Theresienwiese fairgrounds, denouncing the leadership of Iran’s Islamic Republic following the deadly repression of nationwide protests in January.
Human rights groups have reported that thousands of protesters were killed in Iran.
The crowd joined in chants supporting Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the former shah of Iran, with many waving flags with a lion and a sun against horizontal green, white and red stripes, the emblem of the monarchy overthrown in 1979.
“We are here today to support the people in Iran that were murdered by the mullah regime,” one of the protesters, 40-year-old Ali Farzad, told AFP. “And we are here to support Reza Pahlavi as our leader through the transition for a period.”
“The Iranian regime is a dead regime,” a 62-year-old protester originally from Iran who gave his name only as Said told AFP. “It must be game over.”
Speakers chanted slogans including “Javid shah” (long live the shah), “Pahlavi bar migarde” (Pahlavi is coming back) and “Reza II”, in a call for Pahlavi to become the successor to the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, his grandfather Reza Shah.
Rallies calling for international action against Tehran are also planned in Toronto and Los Angeles on Saturday.
Pahlavi earlier spoke at the Munich Security Conference and called on US President Donald Trump to “help” the Iranian people.
Pahlavi, who has lived in exile since his father was overthrown in the 1979 revolution, urged an outside “humanitarian intervention to prevent more innocent lives” being lost in Iran.
Razieh Shahverdi, a 34-year-old Iranian who lives in Paris and works in marketing, said she came to Munich to demonstrate following Pahlavi’s appeal to the diaspora to show support for those protesting in Iran.
“So that is why we are here, to amplify their voices and to show our support,” she told AFP.
“We are here to ask the world to support the leader of Iranians in the transition phase, to have a transitional government and then to have a referendum,” she added.
“And also we need intervention from the foreign powers.”
‘Too many killed’
Several demonstrators in Munich who spoke with AFP denounced US-led international negotiations with Iran, saying that Iran’s leaders do not have legitimacy.
“They shouldn’t talk to them because they are not actually a government. We don’t like them, we don’t accept them,” said Riana, a 40-year-old doctor in Germany who declined to give her last name out of concern for her family’s safety.
“When a government kills their people on the street, they are not (trustworthy),” she said, adding that the world should know that “too many people have been killed and too many people have been injured”.
“The people that you are negotiating with are not representative of the Iranian people,” Farzad said.
The Theresienwiese, which hosts the huge annual Oktoberfest folk gathering, is located less than three kilometres (1.8 miles) from the security conference venue.
Last week, an estimated 10,000 people rallied in Berlin in response to a call from the MEK, an exiled Iranian opposition group considered “terrorist” by Tehran.