Iran’s Theocracy Rocked By Most Serious Uprising In Decades

The current demonstrations against the Iranian regime are the most consequential challenge to the government’s legitimacy since the birth of the Islamic theocracy in 1979.

Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, spoke to Morning Wire about the protests rocking the country. Iranians who have joined the anti-government protests in recent weeks are directly challenging the legitimacy of the cleric-controlled system.

“Iranians pushed past reform, Iranians pushed past the ballot box and found the street to be the best way to contest the state and make their case, not just to their fellow compatriots and citizens, but to the world that they seek wholesale political change – not evolution, not musical chairs at the top, not another fig leaf, not putting lipstick on a pig,” said Taleblu.

Large-scale protests against the regime’s legitimacy have occurred since 2017. The current iteration appears so far to have come the closest to achieving the regime change called for in recent years.

The current round of protests is “the most important challenge to the regime’s legitimacy from the street in the past 46 years,” according to Taleblu. “It has all the hallmarks of what we’ve seen over the past years – wholesale political change being the goal, very tough anti-regime and national slogans being the goal. But also more importantly, it has a very broad demography and very broad geography.”

One of the unique features of the current protest is the calls for the return of the shah and the dynasty that ruled Iran prior to the theocratic dictatorship that took over in 1979. It remains unclear how widespread that support is and whether the Pahlavi dynasty — the line continued in exile by Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi — can be viewed as a realistic option to replace the clerics who lead the Iranian regime.

Pahlavi himself has said that he could serve as a bridge between the clerical regime and a new democratic or republican Iran. Pahlavi’s self-perception is also shared by many protesters, who see the exiled prince as a potential stabilizing force between the fall of one regime and the rise of another, more popular one, according to Taleblu.

“The most important question is not if-and-when the regime falls, but how the regime falls, what role the West plays, what role Washington plays, what kind of linkage there is between external opposition and internal opposition? These are all important factors because how the regime falls will tell you if there’s evolution, if there’s devolution, or if there is revolution. And this is something that we cannot be indifferent to,” said Taleblu.

If the rule of the ayatollahs in Iran crumbles, the new regime could be democratic, which would be in the best interests of the United States and the Iranian people, Taleblu said. The shape of the new regime is, in large part, dependent on the extent of support the protesters receive from outside the country. With minimal external support, the country is likely to be ruled by the military, which currently answers to the clerics.