TEHRAN, Iran — Toward the end of a lively press conference Aug. 6 with Iran’s new president, a young reporter for the Reformist newspaper Shargh prefaced her question by thanking Hassan Rouhani for the mere chance to participate.

“After eight years, we have the opportunity to talk to a president,” said the reporter, alluding to the fact that her newspaper had been excluded from similar sessions with former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. She then proceeded to press Rouhani on whether and when he would release political prisoners still jailed for supporting Reformist candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi in the disputed 2009 presidential elections.

Allegations of fraud in Ahmadinejad’s re-election led to mammoth popular protests and a brutal government crackdown. Mousavi and Karroubi have both been under house arrest for more than two years and scores of lawyers, journalists, women and labor activists are still in jail. Mohammad Karroubi, a son of the detained candidate, told Al-Monitor in an email that his family has heard nothing officially about his father’s fate, that all Green Movement activists must be freed before his father will accept release and that neither Karroubi nor Mousavi is about to “apologize” for their 2009 activities unless “the system apologized for the police crackdown in the last four years."

Less than a week after Rouhani’s Aug. 4 inauguration, it is far too soon to say that Iran will be a kinder, gentler country than it has been under Ahmadinejad. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, still has the final say on internal security matters, along with key officials from the Revolutionary Guard and the intelligence establishment. But with the return to the presidency of a centrist who won thanks in large part to the backing of Ahmadinejad’s less hard-line predecessors — Mohammad Khatami and Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — the oppressive mood in Tehran has lifted slightly and the political kaleidoscope is shifting again.