Having started last December 28, 2025, the anti-government protests in Iran show no signs of stopping, between the Internet blackout in Tehran (and not only, also in Tabriz and the holy city of Mashhad) and the songs of rebellion. Despite the interrupted telephone lines throughout the country – as also reported by the independent organization Netblocks which monitors Internet freedom and digital communications interruptions worldwide in real time – the images of the crowds taking to the streets of more than 100 Iranian cities reached everywhere on social media and on Persian-language television channels based outside the country.
Furthermore, according to local sources, two members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (armed force responsible for repressing or managing protests), better known as “Pasdaran”, were killed in Kermanshah (western Iran) in a clash with “separatist elements”. There are already dozens of deaths among the demonstrators, but due to censorship it is difficult to have precise data on this matter. According to the human rights NGO Iran Human Rights (IHR), Iranian security forces have so far killed at least 45 protesters, including eight minors, while there have been at least 2,000 arrests. Meanwhile, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Massud Pezeshkian called for restraint from the demonstrators and called on the security forces not to hit the demonstrators and to distinguish between protest and violence.
To better understand what triggered this situation and what could happen next, we interviewed geopolitical analyst Andrea Gaspardo.
What is at the origin of these protests?
The protests began on December 28, 2025, but to understand their origins we need to go back six years.
The Gordian knot of this story is the economic crisis that Iran is experiencing as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic: the Iranian economy, in fact, has never managed to recover from the inflationary phenomenon that hit it. Continuous economic and currency crises were then intertwined with the water crisis and, above all, the energy crisis (the country has been experiencing continuous electricity blackouts for two years), bringing the population to the limit of endurance.
As if that were not enough, the 12-day war last June between Israel and Iran and the US bombing of the sites where the Iranian nuclear program was taking place, Iran severed all relations with the IAEA and other monitoring organizations. As a result, the international community immediately reinstated the sanctions regime which completely strangled the country’s economy, which entered a devastating inflationary spiral (in December it was 42.2%): the Rial, the Iranian currency, has dramatically lost value against the dollar and all other international currencies. We can therefore say that the Rial is waste paper, right now. Clearly all this has heavily affected the purchasing capacity of a large part of the Iranian population, and the spark was sparked precisely by the bazaars, a category that has great social and political weight in Iran (it has always been a pillar of the Iranian theocratic regime), given that it has trade in its hands.
The protests started right from the “Bazaar Stronghold” of Tehran, and then quickly spread to other cities. In the meantime they have invested all the other states of the society. At the moment, however, it is difficult to quantify the extent of the phenomenon, although many observers have stated that these are the largest protests in Iran since those of 2022-2023, which erupted under the slogan “Women, Life and Freedom” after the killing of Mahsa Amini by the Islamic morality police.
The fact that the Iranian regime is taking the issue seriously can be seen from the fact that alongside the normal tools of repression there is the authorities’ attempt to deal with trade associations and representatives (especially of the bazaars). The regime knows that these associations occupy an important position in the economic and social sphere, and without their support the clerics, the pasdaraan and those who hold the levers of power in the Islamic Republic would struggle to keep the people under control.
What does “Pahlavi is coming back” mean and what does it have to do with the USA
During the demonstrations some people raised the slogan stating that “Pahlavi is coming back”. However, it must be said that Reza Pahlavi, son of the last Shah of Iran, is not a noteworthy political figure: he has demonstrated very little political acumen in the past, and he is a person of limited strategic horizons: his past statements have essentially expressed the idea that Iranians “owe” him a throne. But if it were to obtain it, there would hardly be a change of regime, a democratic and cutting-edge Iran set in a process of convergence with the more developed and Westernized countries. He and the supporters of “the Pahlavi monarchy” – which was expelled in 1979 by the Iranians after being guilty of horrendous crimes – seem to me to be anti-historical reasoning and not worthy of consideration.
Today in Iran the protests lack leadership, and Pahlavi has emerged as the most prominent figure, paradoxically, without having a “leader” role. History teaches, however, that a revolution has a greater chance of success the more visible its leaders are, capable of channeling anger into political action. If there are no military interventions by external powers, there is the risk that the protests will ultimately be suffocated by the regime with a mixture of repression towards the most intransigent demonstrators and instrumental dialogue towards those more malleable segments of the protest.
Meanwhile, the American far-right influencer Laura Loomer announced on X that Reza Pahlavi would be expected at Mar-a-Lago next Tuesday, even if the meeting with Donald Trump has not yet been confirmed. If the news were to prove true, it would confirm Reza’s plan to propose himself as a leader of the protests, seeking the “blessing” of the tycoon, who has stated several times in recent days that the United States is ready to intervene in the event of lethal violence being used against peaceful demonstrators. Speaking to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump said:
I let them know that if they start killing people, which they have a tendency to do during protests, they have a lot of them, if they do that, we will hit them very hard.
The great enemies USA and Israel: what they would gain if they intervened to overthrow the Iranian regime
Americans and Israelis, even more so after the short war last July, if they were to intervene jointly it would be for a very specific purpose: that of overthrowing the regime of the ayatollahs. Israel is eager to eliminate a regime it considers an enemy, and hopes that its overthrow will lead to a reduction in military pressure on its borders.
The Americans, on the other hand, would like to get rid of the Iranian regime because in the grand scheme of the global conflict that pits the United States against China, the overthrow of the regime would seriously affect Beijing’s energy supplies. Furthermore, Russia would also be affected, because together with North Korea in recent years it has stood out among the Kremlin’s military suppliers in the war with Ukraine, in particular for the sale of Shahed drones. A regime change could disrupt supplies and industrial agreements, putting Moscow in difficulty.
