The son of Iran’s ousted shah says he is in regular contact with various elements of the highly-divided Iranian opposition in exile, reiterating his desire “to serve as a unifying national figure, not a partisan one”, AFP reports.

Reza Pahlavi made the comments during a visit to Stockholm, where he gave a speech on the premises of the country’s parliament, invited by the conservative Christian Democrats and the far-right Sweden Democrats.

The Iranian opposition remains deeply fragmented, with groups drawn from ethnic minorities, liberal circles and left-wing movements opposed to him and his supporters.

Asked what he was doing to bring together the different parts of Iranian society, Pahlavi replied, “I talk to them, I hold dialogue with them, I meet them,” without specifying exactly with whom.

He said there was “enough room” for anyone who prescribed to the four basic principles he believed formed the foundation of a “democratic discourse”: a clear separation of state and religion; equality of all citizens before the law; and the establishment of a mechanism to organise free and fair elections.

“Any Iranians — regardless if they are leftist, centre or right, monarchist or republicans, or regardless [of the] ethnicities that they represent — [if they] believe in this approach, [they] can work together and cooperate,” he argued.