They are some of the most dramatic anti-government protests in the 43-year history of Iran’s Islamic Republic, with unrest in big cities, small towns, across the social spectrum, and from ethnic Kurdish to Persian to Azeri.
The street protests have led to the deaths of at least 26 people over the past week, Iranian state television said on Friday after a seventh day of street clashes took place between protesters and police overnight.
But despite the fury of demonstrators, analysts and diplomats are doubtful that the outbreak of unorganised and leaderless political unrest could lead to the toppling of the regime, or even meaningful change within Iran’s rigid, multilayered systems of coercive control.
“We should put aside all the illusions that the Islamic Republic is about to collapse,” said Hamidreza Azizi, an Iran expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, a think tank in Berlin. “The political system has much capacity in terms of the means of suppression that it has not yet resorted to.
“But for quite a long time we have been wrongly focused on the exact political entity that may or may not come out of this or that process.
“For now the protest itself and the fate of the society is more important than the nature of the future political system.”
Analysts though have detected different dimensions about the latest wave of political unrest that could shape Iran for years and perhaps change the calculations of Western leaders who, despite their abhorrence of the Iranian regime, are seeking to restore a nuclear deal with Tehran and possibly tap into Iran’s vast energy resources to ease global oil and gas prices.
Even sceptics caution that anything could happen in Iran. Some 45 years ago, few thought that street protests over a newspaper article that angered seminary students in the shrine city of Qom would lead months later to the collapse of the Iranian monarchy and the establishment of a theocratic regime.
The protests this month were ignited by the 16 September death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was detained in Tehran by a notorious paramilitary unit that enforces Islamic dress codes on 13 September and fell into a coma while in custody under still unclear circumstances.
Unlike previous protests rooted in specific economic or political grievances, this wave was sparked by a deeply emotional public reaction to the death of Amini, an ethnic Kurd whose family has alleged she was physically abused by her captors.
The fiery, violent protests have drawn people across Iran’s gender, political, economic and ethnic dividing lines into the streets. They have come together in an unprecedented display of unity and collective rage targeting the security forces and the symbols of state power, including police stations, headquarters of paramilitary groups and public propaganda displays.
“This is different from earlier protests,” said Mahdi Ghodsi, an Iran specialist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. “There’s no leader for now, but leaders will emerge. This is a process that will take more time.”
Iran has been here before.
In 2009, following the disputed re-election of populist hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured into the streets to protest, triggering months of political unrest and repression. Since 2018, numerous outbreaks of political protest over economic frustrations have rocked Iran.
Both rounds of protest altered the calculations abroad. Officials in Washington under both presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump and elsewhere in the West saw them as a chance to supplant the Islamic regime that took control of Iran following a 1979 revolution.
Iranian demonstrators taking to the streets of Tehran
But both cases failed to result in political change, and actually preceded efforts by the regime to ramp up repression and purge moderates from its ranks. Already Iran’s authorities appear to be gearing up for a harsh crackdown, comparing the protesters with the jihadi group Isis.
“In its conspiracy, the enemy pulled together, mobilised and organised all its capacities and equipped them with the weapon of violence,” the Revolutionary Guard declared in a statement on Thursday.
Political scientists have long questioned the ability of protests to bring about change in places like Iran. In recent years, protests in Russia and Hong Kong emboldened autocratic leaders to increase repression. The proliferation of sophisticated electronic surveillance tools has made cracking down on dissent easier for determined autocrats.
In theory, street protests and ensuing waves of repression could fragment the ruling elite and bring about a political breakthrough. But Iran’s regime has systematically marginalised any potential reformers from its hierarchy, overwhelmingly empowering military, security service and religious hardliners fanatically loyal to supreme leader Ali Khamenei.
Iranian soldiers march during the annual military parade marking the anniversary of the outbreak of the devastating 1980-1988 war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in the capital Tehran on Thursday
