Opinion Fear of Tehran’s regime is receding in Iran
Iran’s streets have again become a national ledger of grievance. The protest wave began in late December 2025 with a familiar trigger: A currency slide and prices that jumped faster than wages. Shopkeepers in Tehran were among the first to register the shock. Anger then travelled from bazaars to neighbourhoods, from the capital to provincial […]
Protesters participate in a demonstration in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany, in support of the nationwide mass protests in Iran against the government. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi) Iran’s streets have again become a national ledger of grievance. The protest wave began in late December 2025 with a familiar trigger: A currency slide and prices that jumped faster than wages. Shopkeepers in Tehran were among the first to register the shock. Anger then travelled from bazaars to neighbourhoods, from the capital to provincial towns. Rail-drumming and pot-banging have turned protest into a daily pulse. Rights monitors speak of deaths and mass detentions, while a tightening communications clampdown makes precise counts hard to verify in real time.
Protest in the Islamic Republic has become part of the political calendar, returning whenever the gap widens between what the state promises and what it permits. The Green Movement of 2009 showed how quickly electoral hope can be converted into a security file. The fuel-price uprising of 2019 made clear how economic shock travels into political anger. The revolt of 2022, after the death of Mahsa Amini, pushed dignity into the centre of politics. Each wave ended with repression. Each also left behind a sharper sense of how tightly politics is fenced in.
This round has its own vocabulary. One line carried across cities: “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, we are all together.” It is less a slogan of ideology than of courage, a way of keeping the crowd from splintering into isolated households. It also signals a shift in political agency. People no longer wait for authorised intermediaries to speak. They speak to one another, and they stay.
The official story remains stubbornly external. President Masoud Pezeshkian has spoken of “terrorists” and foreign masterminds, urging families to keep youth away from the streets, while promising that the government will listen and ease economic pain. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has reached for the language of vandals and saboteurs. The label is functional. It turns citizens into suspects and recasts a demand for repair as a security problem. In that move, the regime avoids the hardest reckoning: The economic wreckage it has presided over, and the lives it keeps under moral supervision.
To see why anger keeps returning, it helps to name the system. Iran functions as a tutelary democracy, with elections that choreograph participation under clerical oversight. The regime has cultivated ritualised republicanism, where voting becomes a performance of consent rather than a mechanism of accountability. Managed pluralism offers competition inside a narrow frame, then narrows it again through disqualification. The consequence is post-reformist fatigue, shaped by disenchantment with candidates and an electoral theatre that offers choice in measured doses, then calls it representation.
In that exhausted space, “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (women, life, freedom) still carries a deeper claim. It signals a collective uncoupling of gendered authority from divine legitimacy. The veil has operated as symbolic obedience, a daily sign of acquiescence that the state has weaponised. This time, fear is lifting, and refusal travels beyond any single issue.
Another chant sharpens the political meaning of the moment: “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran.” Citizens refuse to be spoken for through the regime’s regional posture. The struggle is anchored in lived deprivation and political closure, in the demand to renegotiate the domestic contract that has governed since 1979. Iran’s protesters speak in the first person, with a clarity that cuts through slogans produced elsewhere.
Reports of a nationwide internet shutdown suggest connectivity has been reduced to near blackout. The aim is to fracture coordination and isolate neighbourhoods. The authorities have responded with force. They have done it before, and they retain the machinery. But force will not restore a grammar of legitimacy that is already fraying. Change may be slow. What is becoming irreversible is the lifting of fear that once passed for obedience. It shows up in an insistence on public presence. From street gatherings to balcony drumming and shuttered shops, the change is visible beyond the capital, and scripted acquiescence is losing its hold.
The writer is professor at the Centre for West Asian Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
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