Are These Iran Protests Different?

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

 

There have been convulsive displays of mass public unrest inside Iran before. Each of them held out the promise of dealing a fatal blow to the theocratic regime in Tehran, and each of them failed to deliver on that potential.

 

There was the 2009 “Green Movement” that erupted in response to the disputed reelection of former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — an outpouring of anti-regime sentiment Barack Obama could not bring himself to endorse (a hesitancy he later regretted). There were the “Day of Rage” protests, which lasted for a year and coincided with the 2011 Arab Spring. There was unrest over growing food prices in 2017 and 2018. Riots paralyzed the country in 2019 amid a spike in gasoline prices. In 2022, Iran’s urban centers were marred by civil unrest as Iranians protested the arrest and subsequent death in custody of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian woman punished by the state’s religious police for wearing her hijab “improperly.”

 

This is a partial list of the uprisings that presented existential challenges to the Iranian regime. On each occasion, the regime emerged battered but intact. Given that background, it’s understandable why critics of the status quo inside Iran wouldn’t want to get their hopes up over the latest round of demonstrations, which began on Sunday. And yet, the hardships with which the Iranian people are struggling are virtually unprecedented. And although the government’s response to them has been as brutal as ever, its representatives sound scared.

 

“I have asked the interior minister to listen to the legitimate demands of the protesters by engaging in dialogue with their representatives so that the government can do everything in its power to resolve the problems and act responsibly,” wrote Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in a social media post. Parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf agreed. “People’s concerns and protests regarding livelihood problems must be responded to with full responsibility and dialogue,” he declared.

 

“This is not something I want to be proud of,” Pezeshkian reportedly told a parliamentary assembly on Sunday. In his address, he agonized over how the growing cost of living threatens the regime in two ways — both by enraging the public and by throttling tax revenues. Worse, to remedy one problem by fiat is to exacerbate the other. “I have no motivation to remain in government or to remain president if I cannot solve the problems of the people and the deprived,” Pezeshkian mused.

 

On Monday, Iran’s Justice Ministry chief, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, called for “the swift punishment of those responsible for currency fluctuations.” As such, the head of Iran’s central bank resigned and will be replaced by Abdolnaser Hemmati, a former economy and finance minister whom the Iranian parliament removed in March over frustrations with the Iranian rial’s deteriorating purchasing power. That sop to public opinion is unlikely to satisfy the suffering Iranian people.

 

The rial has lost approximately 60 percent of its value against the dollar (“Shopkeepers say everything is priced in dollars now, even milk, with prices rising almost daily,” one Iranian pensioner told the Financial Times). That condition is driven by rising inflation and crippling new U.S. and European sanctions aimed at the country’s nuclear weapons program. The country’s inflation rate hit 42.2 percent in December. Food prices are up by about 72 percent over the year. Health and medical supply prices are up by 50 percent.

 

The government is set to hike gasoline prices, too, sparking fears of renewed fuel riots à la 2019. New taxes are due to come online in March, but the government is also pursuing a plan to boost wages by as much as 20 percent — a cold comfort for those who understand that artificially hiking the public’s purchasing power at a time of high inflation contributes to even greater inflation. But Iranian state media have blamed the country’s experiment with market liberalization for the economy’s woes, suggesting a return to socialist policy prescriptions.

 

Power outages are common. Public services are breaking down. And parts of the country are running out of water. The shortage is so acute, in fact, that Iranian officials were seriously contemplating in November the evacuation of the Iranian government from Tehran.

 

The Iranian people are at the end of their rope, and they’re letting their dissatisfaction be known. “Don’t be afraid, we are together,” protesters could be heard chanting in the verified videos that have somehow managed to escape one of the world’s most censorious and restrictive internet-monitoring regimes. “Iranians will die but won’t accept humiliation,” they bellowed. Demonstrators shouted “azadi,” the Farsi word for “freedom,” while the more daring sort declared “death to the dictator” as they marched. Some even called for the return of the Pahlavi dynasty, which ruled the country prior to the Islamic Revolution.

 

The shopkeepers who were forced to close their stores for want of paying customers are complaining openly to local media outlets — outlets that broadcast their complaints unreservedly. “In some sectors, the level of trade activity was reduced to a minimum, and many units preferred to refrain from conducting transactions to avoid potential losses,” one state-run Iranian news agency reported.

 

Today, the political opposition inside Iran is speaking out, albeit from the confines of their jail cells. In an interview with the Telegraph, the imprisoned Iranian dissident Mostafa Tajzadeh called for a revolution. It is time, he said, “for the clergy to hand power back to the people, and to return to their traditional base in the seminaries.” In other words, the collapse of the regime that took power in a 1979 coup.

 

The Iranian regime is not rolling over for the protesters. It has responded, as it reliably does, with indiscriminate force. Security forces clad in riot gear glut the streets of major Iranian cities. They have been seen firing tear gas and other non-lethal ordnance into the country’s restive crowds. In a stirring piece in the Jerusalem Post, Alex Winston zeroes in on one searing image from the ongoing demonstrations in Tehran — a photo featuring a single Iranian crouched defiantly in front of an oncoming column of Basiji militia forces on motorcycles. He called it “Iran’s Tiananmen moment.”

 

The unrest has so far been most pronounced among what Winston calls the bazaari class — a constituency of merchants on whom the country’s clerical leadership depend for stability and legitimacy. “We have been waiting to see if the students will join,” one plugged-in Iranian observer told Post journalists. “On Monday night, reports came out that students from four universities across Tehran had joined in the demonstrations, potentially signaling a positive addition to protesters,” Winston’s report read. And as the Wall Street Journal reported, the post-10/7 war between Iran and its terrorist proxies and Israel showed how hollow the Iranian security forces have become. The twelve-day war, in particular, “exposed Iran’s inability to defend its population from attack, as well as the failure of its intelligence services to prevent deep penetration by Israeli spies.”

 

The Iranian people languish under a repressive theocratic regime committed to terrible economic policy that cannot even keep the public safe from the various “satans” against which its government rails interminably. That’s a bad bargain. Maybe these riots turn out like all the rest. Or perhaps this time really is different.