Protests Spread in Iran Due to Economic Hardship and Uncertainty

What Happened?

What began as localized protests by shop owners in Tehran over the devaluation of Iranian currency, has spread across Iran and morphed into widespread anti-government protests. In Tehran, several of the protestors were shouting, ‘Khamenei will be toppled this year!’ 

Video footage showed large crowds marching through downtown Tehran and protests far beyond the capital, including the western cities of Zanjan and Hamedan. By Tuesday, more footage showed that protests had spread to other big cities, including Shiraz, Yazd, and Isfahan. President Masoud Pezeshkian posted on social media, ‘The people’s livelihood is my daily concern,’ while promising to enact swift reforms of Iran’s banking system. 

Why it Matters

The protests in Iran are the first ones to take place since the Gaza War began in 2023. While the Iranian regime has made defeating Israel a central pillar of its policies, the crowds in Tehran on Monday were chanting, ‘Palestine and Gaza, sacrifice both for Iran.’ Translations of the protestor's statements were provided by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute. The public rejection of one of Khamenei’s top priorities by Iranians lays bare a major contradiction at the heart of the current ruling regime in Iran.

For years, Khamenei’s regime has devoted considerable resources towards growing Iran’s armed forces, and most of that was advertised as a way to bring about the military defeat of Israel.

With so much attention and effort focused on Israel, the regime in Tehran has paid less attention to problems at home, relying on brutal tactics to silence dissent instead of addressing any of the underlying reasons for it. But Israel’s swift defeat of Iranian military forces demonstrated that Tehran has long been so corrupt that resources earmarked for military spending were instead pocketed by the political elite. 

Which explains why Iran’s military and its proxies performed so poorly against Israel in Lebanon and Gaza. For years, the Iranian political elite have looted state coffers, and as long as they publicly continued to shower praise on the Supreme Leader and back his policies, nothing was done about their corruption.

The Supreme Leader appointed or approved every key position of power in the Iranian government, and he did so not based on merit but solely on their loyalty to him personally. As a result, for years, poorly qualified officials ran Iran’s government into the ground while making themselves rich.

How it Affects You

Many times in the past two decades, protests in Iran have been characterized as the beginning of the end of the Khamenei regime. While it is too soon to make such a sweeping conclusion today, the regime in Tehran has never been weaker than it is right now.

An aging Supreme Leader, now eighty-six years old and largely hidden from public view to hide his frailty, may finally be losing his grip on the government of Iran. Khamenei came to power in 1979 through a popular uprising, and he could go out the same way.