Introduction
The Iranian protest movement is entering its third week, marked by unprecedented levels of popular anger. While the internet has largely been cut, and reliable information is scarce, current estimates suggest that more than 2,000 people have been killed and over 15,000 arrested. The scale of repression already indicates that the state is confronting not a limited disturbance, but a deep and widening social rupture.
Although much Western media coverage has portrayed Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former Shah deposed in 1979, as a central opposition figure, the reality appears far removed from this narrative. At present, there is no credible, socially rooted alternative leadership. This absence has proven decisive, not only for the trajectory of the uprising but also for the possibility of building unity among Iranians inside the country and in the diaspora. It has rendered the movement vulnerable to external appropriation and to the strategic interests of foreign powers, particularly the United States and Israel.
Opposition
Iran’s opposition remains deeply fragmented and weak. This condition is not merely organisational but historical. Secular and leftist organisations were systematically repressed under the Pahlavi monarchy prior to 1979. During the revolution, many of these forces united tactically around Ayatollah Khomeini against the Shah’s dictatorship. Yet within a year of the revolution, the Islamic Republic initiated mass executions, imprisonments, and purges of its former allies. Large sections of Iran’s political and intellectual opposition were forced into exile. Those permitted to remain inside Iran were confined to narrow, tightly managed political spaces.
Along with the destruction of the left and the stopping of reformism, Iran’s nationalist secular organisations have also been sidelined. The forces that once stood for constitutionalism, national sovereignty, and republican secularism, such as the remnants of the National Front and groups that worked with it, were crushed by the Islamic Republic after the revolution. These movements lack resources, organisational support, and access to international platforms. As a result, they cannot establish themselves within their own countries or compete with funded opposition groups.
Even within these constraints, a major rupture emerged in 2009 with the Green Movement, led by reformist figures Mir-Hossein Mousavi (former prime minister), Mehdi Karroubi (former parliamentary speaker), and Zahra Rahnavard (academic and women’s rights activist). What began as a protest against electoral fraud rapidly became a mass challenge to the Islamic Republic’s authority and its claim to popular consent. The Green Movement exposed deep fractures within the ruling elite and marked a decisive rupture in the regime’s political legitimacy. It revealed both the limits of controlled reform and the weakness of institutional opposition after decades of repression.
Following the crushing of the Green Movement, reformist currents steadily lost whatever credibility remained. Their refusal to confront the core architecture of power, Velayat-e Faqih, the Guardian Council, and the security state, reduced them to administrators of decline. As repression intensified, reformist leaders were neutralised through house arrests, bans, and political erasure, leaving behind a widespread disillusionment.
In parallel, the Islamic Republic systematically dismantled or imprisoned trade Union leaders, dissident clerics, intellectuals, journalists, and even figures from within its own ranks who might have articulated alternative political horizons. Independent unions, student organisations, women’s networks, and socialist formations were criminalised, infiltrated, or destroyed.
Exile Media and Opposition
After the Green Movement’s defeat, many Iranians left the country. Some became journalists and commentators in emerging Persian-language media outlets such as Iran International, Voice of America, the BBC Persian Service, and numerous privately funded television and radio stations based in the West, many of which increasingly reflected monarchist or right-wing opposition perspectives, alongside a smaller number of independent digital platforms. While Iranian state media expanded multilingual broadcasting to promote the regime’s anti-imperialist self-image, opposition-oriented outlets, often heavily financed from abroad, focused on destabilising the Islamic Republic. This media environment further displaced political production from Iranian society itself.
As a result, what now circulates internationally as “the Iranian opposition” is largely produced outside Iran. Exiled figures dominate global representations of dissent. Among the most visible are Reza Pahlavi and the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK). Both enjoy privileged access to Western political platforms and media circuits, yet neither commands deep legitimacy inside Iranian society. The MEK’s collaboration with Saddam Hussein during the Iran–Iraq War irreparably damaged its standing, while Reza Pahlavi remains inseparable, for many Iranians, from the authoritarianism and foreign dependency of the monarchy. Their prominence reflects not social rootedness, but geopolitical utility.
Western Intervention
This externalisation of opposition politics is inseparable from a broader international environment in which Iranian instability is framed less as a democratic crisis than as a strategic opportunity. Iran’s modern history has repeatedly been shaped by foreign intervention, from twentieth-century regime engineering to contemporary sanctions, covert operations, and proxy conflicts. Anti-imperialism thus became a foundational narrative of the 1979 revolution. Today, however, the regime’s legitimacy crisis has produced a bitter paradox: foreign powers present themselves rhetorically as defenders of the Iranian people while pursuing policies that have intensified economic collapse, social fragmentation, and collective punishment.
These dynamics have been further complicated by claims, sometimes even from Israeli- and US-linked sources themselves, that Israeli intelligence has “intervened” inside Iran and is “proud” of doing so. That states conduct covert activities is not surprising. Beyond sanctions, they have invested heavily in Persian-language opposition media to maintain pressure and to cultivate openings aligned with their own strategic interests.
Warfare and Violence
Yet these claims have enabled both the Islamic Republic and sections of the monarchist right to reframe the uprising as externally driven. At the same time, we are living in a world where more than 70,000 people have been killed in Gaza with near-total impunity, where protest is criminalised, and where the charge of “genocide” is increasingly equated with antisemitism. This global environment has reshaped how opposition is managed and neutralised. Human life has been profoundly devalued.
The Islamic Republic is not isolated from this context. It observes Gaza. It observes other sites of mass killing. It calculates that terror no longer shocks. It is a dictatorship facing a deep structural crisis, but it assumes that through intimidation it can buy time. This calculation is reinforced by the broader global normalisation of mass violence, alongside the geopolitical polarisation generated by the war in Palestine, US foreign policy, and regime-change narratives elsewhere.
Indeed, the Iranian movement has been actively discredited internationally, obscuring what the protests are materially about: dictatorship, economic collapse, unpaid wages, and extreme wealth-poverty polarisation. Those who have attempted to “own” the uprising through foreign symbolism or elite spectacle have not strengthened it; they have weakened it.
Appropriation of Struggle
While the Islamic Republic claims those killed were foreign agents, monarchist currents around Reza Pahlavi have openly appealed to figures such as Donald Trump and far-right personalities like Tommy Robinson, a British extremist with a long criminal record linked to the English Defence League. Such alliances not only fail to build unity among Iranians but also actively alienate anti-war and anti-imperialist currents in the West, making international solidarity far more difficult. These alliances not only fail to foster unity among Iranians but also actively alienate anti-war and anti-imperialist movements in the West, making international solidarity significantly more difficult. As a result, both Iranian and international support for these protests is weakened, leading to a fragile unity that undermines the Iranian struggle.
In this environment, digital echo chambers intensify fragmentation. Social media increasingly consolidates ideological bubbles rather than broadening political horizons. Within these spaces, simplified narratives dominate: “The Islamic Republic says Mossad did it; therefore, Mossad did it, finished.” The result is not clarity but closure.
Under these conditions, the Iranian uprising confronts not only repression, but the long historical consequences of destroyed political organisation, exile-driven representation, and a global order in which violence has become administratively routine. The crisis of opposition thus stands alongside the crisis of the state. Without the slow reconstruction of socially rooted political agency inside Iran, the revolt remains vulnerable—both to authoritarian annihilation and to geopolitical appropriation.
Emergence of a New Political Organisation
Across Iran, workers, women, and youth are facing shared challenges of economic hardship, exclusion, and repression in an increasingly hostile international environment. Together, authoritarianism and external pressures are creating conditions for a new political movement rooted in social justice, equality, and democratic participation, rather than authoritarian rule or foreign influence. This movement is not about reverting to the past or simply swapping one form of domination for another. Any sustainable transformation must emerge from the organised efforts of ordinary people. In this sense, the current uprising not only highlights the regime’s deepening crisis but also signals the early formation of a new social and political force.
