Mir-Hossein Mousavi of Foreign Affairs and eventually the post of Prime Minister. He was the last Prime Minister in Iran prior to the 1989 constitutional changes which removed the post of prime minister; he then went into semi-retirement for the next 20 years. He remains a member of the Expediency Discernment Council and the High Council of Cultural Revolution. However, he has not participated in their meetings for years, which is interpreted by political analysts and commentators as a sign of his disapproval. For the 2009 Iranian Presidential election, Mousavi came out of semi-retirement and ran as one of two Reformist candidates
Mir-Hossein Mousavi as well as the conservative newspaper "Jomhouri-e Eslami", supported Mousavi's candidacy, he did not receive the official backing of any major conservative party. His candidacy made it harder for the conservatives to support Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and large conservative parties, such as the Combatant Clergy Association, did not back the current President for a second term of office. Mousavi had on numerous occasions indicated his wish to change the constitution in order to remove the existing ban on the private ownership of television stations (currently all Iranian television stations are state-owned), as well as transfer the control of the law-enforcement forces