Iran’s streets are once again loud with the Iranian people’s calls for freedom. Shopkeepers are closing their stores to go on strike. Universities are telling students to go home to prevent them from demonstrating. Riot police are shooting at protesters with live ammunition. And in freezing city squares, water cannons are blasting crowds as if the Islamic Republic has water to waste despite the nation’s current self-inflicted shortage.
What began on 28 December as a wave of protests tied to the regime’s economic mismanagement has grown into a clear message to the international community about who the Iranian people believe truly represents their best interests and their future. This clarity is what sets these protests apart. Iranians are not only rejecting the regime, they are openly identifying the figure they believe can unify their struggle against it.
For years, many analysts in the West have insisted that Iran’s democratic opposition is leaderless, or that leadership is inherently suspect, or that leadership must come from inside Iran, a country where the slightest organised opposition is brutally crushed and prominent activists are summarily jailed. The Iranian people are answering those questions and ending that debate in real time. They are doing it with chants that are impossible to misread.
Across nearly 100 cities, towns, and villages, crowds have been recorded chanting slogans that explicitly call for the return of Reza Pahlavi, the Crown Prince of Iran who has been in exile since the Islamic Republic seized power in 1979. These chants include: “This is the final battle, Pahlavi will return”, “Long live the Shah” and “Cry all you want Ali Khamenei, but Pahlavi is returning”. These are words Iranians know could cost them their freedom, or as they’ve been reminded in recent months – by cases like that of Omid Sarlak, an activist who was killed after posting a video online showing himself burning a portrait of the Iranian leader – even their lives. Iranians know these risks, yet they chant the Pahlavi name to show the world who they are united behind. It’s about time the world listened.
The end of the Islamic Republic will be achieved when a mass of Iranians converge around a shared, national symbol and a shared “no” to the existing order. That shared “no” has always been obvious. Now, thanks to this round of protests, the “yes” to a shared, national symbol is also obvious. Even the Islamic Republic understands this shift. Its messaging and crackdowns in recent months have leaned into unfounded conspiracies regarding foreign-supported “monarchist networks” allegedly orchestrating protests and other “socially destabilising activities” within the country. The Islamic Republic does not spend political capital targeting a figure it considers irrelevant. It does this when it sees a rival centre of gravity forming – or in this case, overcoming it.
This is where many in the media and some in the diaspora simply need to grow up. It’s time to set aside long-held understandings and conventional “wisdom” and simply listen to the people of Iran.
It is not nuanced to say you cover the Iranian protests while ignoring – or more accurately, like the Islamic Republic – censoring the figure they are visibly rallying around. It is contradiction masquerading as sophistication. As for activists, a movement fighting batons and bullets does not have the luxury of endless factionalism, especially at the expense of more Iranian lives. Unity is not a moral compromise when the alternative is allowing the Islamic Republic to outlast another wave of opposition by dividing its opponents.
Reza Pahlavi does not have to be anyone’s perfect candidate for a future election to be the central figure of the present struggle. He is not anyone’s competition, indeed he is the guarantor of the process and architect of the institutions that will outlast him and sustain Iran for generations. He is offering, based on his obvious broad-based support, to use his political and cultural capital to oversee the transition to a lasting democracy. His role today is not to demand allegiance. It is to serve as a national rallying point(as he is doing on the streets), to coordinate support (as he is by engaging with the CEOs of some of the world’s largest companies), and to present a credible transition path that reassures Iranians inside the country and governments abroad (as he is with his economic roadmap, the Iran Prosperity Project, and its teams of experts). The chants now echoing through Iran suggest that many protesters already see him that way.
If this is true, then the policy implications for the West are straightforward.
After years of engaging in endless, circular, futile negotiations with representatives of the Islamic Republic, engage with the person who the people of Iran are calling on as their true representative. If Khamenei’s promised protest crackdown causes greater bloodshed, show true solidarity with the protesters: expel the regime’s ambassadors and recall your own. Sanction the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) and its linked entities and officials who carry out crackdowns. Freeze their assets and deny their visas. Make the cost personal and unavoidable for those who beat, shoot, and jail their fellow countrymen, just as you have done for Putin’s corrupt cronies. From London to the south of France, Khamenei has plenty of them. Match Iranians’ moral clarity with your own.
The Islamic Republic has survived for decades by exhausting the people and splitting up the opposition. This protest wave will show them whether that playbook still works. The Iranian people have already made one thing clearer than many commentators in the West ever did: they are not only against the regime, but they also know what they want to come next. The West should stop pretending it can’t hear them.
Cameron Khansarinia is the vice president of the National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI).
[Further reading: Ayatollah Khamenei faces a nuclear nightmare]
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