Iran’s economic protests have developed into something much more serious than the demonstrations I wrote about two weeks ago. What began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar over the collapse of the rial and rising living costs has spread across the country and increasingly turned into direct opposition to the Islamic Republic itself. The government has responded with a nationwide internet blackout, mass arrests and an increasingly severe security crackdown, making reliable information from inside Iran difficult to obtain. This uncertainty is important: casualty estimates vary substantially and claims from the Iranian government, opposition organisations and foreign governments need to be treated cautiously while communications remain restricted. What is clearer is that the political character of the demonstrations has changed. The question is no longer simply whether President Masoud Pezeshkian can stabilise prices or offer economic concessions. Iran is confronting a more fundamental crisis over whether citizens still regard the existing political order as capable of reforming itself. That distinction matters because governments can negotiate over wages, inflation or subsidies much more easily than they can negotiate over their own right to rule.
The internet blackout is particularly revealing because it demonstrates how modern authoritarian power operates through information as well as physical coercion. Shutting communications makes it harder for protesters to coordinate demonstrations, document abuses or establish how widespread resistance actually is. In that sense, censorship reduces the organisational capacity of opposition movements. But it also imposes substantial economic costs on businesses, payments, communications and ordinary citizens, meaning the state damages part of the economy in order to protect political control. More importantly, an information blackout reveals something about the government’s conception of legitimacy. A political order confident that citizens broadly accept its authority should have relatively little reason to prevent citizens from discovering what other citizens believe. Censorship becomes most valuable when the state fears common knowledge: not simply that many people are dissatisfied, but that dissatisfied people might discover how many others share their dissatisfaction.
This is the difference between private opposition and coordinated opposition. An authoritarian regime can survive millions of people disliking it if each person believes resistance is isolated and dangerous. Once citizens see enormous crowds elsewhere, their expectations change. Participation becomes less risky because the probability that others participate rises. This helps explain why revolutions can appear to emerge suddenly even when grievances have existed for years. The underlying dissatisfaction may have changed only gradually; what changes rapidly is citizens’ estimate of whether collective action can succeed. The state therefore attempts to disrupt not only protest itself but the information through which people estimate the strength of protest.
Yet repression contains a contradiction. It can increase the immediate cost of opposition while reducing the regime’s remaining claim to rule through consent. Political philosophers from Hobbes onwards have recognised that governments require coercive authority because order cannot depend entirely on voluntary agreement. But there is an important difference between a state possessing coercive power and a state depending increasingly upon it. The first is normal government; every legal system ultimately requires enforcement. The second suggests the political system is losing what Weber described as legitimate domination: citizens comply less because they accept the authority of institutions and more because non-compliance has become dangerous. A regime can therefore become stronger coercively while becoming weaker politically.
The Islamic Republic has survived this contradiction before. The 2009 Green Movement, the 2019 protests and the 2022–23 uprising after Mahsa Amini’s death all generated predictions that the system might collapse, yet the security establishment remained cohesive. That history should make outside observers extremely cautious about announcing another imminent revolution. Governments do not collapse simply because large numbers of people oppose them. They collapse when enough of the institutions required to reproduce political authority stop cooperating. The most important indicators therefore remain elite defections, sustained nationwide strikes, disruption to strategic industries such as oil, and whether sections of the Revolutionary Guards, Basij or ordinary security forces refuse orders. Protest numbers matter, but the cohesion of the state matters more than the anger of the street until the two begin interacting.
Iran’s economic structure makes that interaction increasingly dangerous because the current crisis follows years of sanctions, inflation, corruption and geopolitical expenditure. The government can blame substantial economic hardship legitimately on American sanctions, particularly restrictions affecting energy exports and financial transactions. But citizens can simultaneously ask why Iran’s political strategy repeatedly produces the international isolation through which sanctions become so damaging. This changes the political argument from “foreign countries are hurting us” towards “why has our government constructed a foreign policy that leaves ordinary citizens paying so much of the price?” A policy can be externally imposed and domestically delegitimising at the same time.
There is also a distributional issue. Sanctions do not affect everyone equally. Politically connected organisations with access to foreign currency, smuggling networks or state contracts can sometimes adapt more successfully than ordinary businesses operating transparently. Sanctions therefore can unintentionally strengthen precisely the actors they are intended to weaken by increasing the value of connections to the state. An economy becomes less competitive and more dependent on political access. This creates a sanctions-rent paradox: external economic pressure can weaken national income while increasing the relative economic power of institutions closest to the regime.
That helps explain why protests originating among merchants matter. If politically connected organisations can protect themselves while independent businesses face currency collapse, sanctions and unpredictable regulation, economic dissatisfaction begins merging with opposition to the political distribution of privilege. A government can ask citizens to tolerate sacrifice for national security more successfully when sacrifice appears shared. It becomes much harder when people believe the politically powerful have insulated themselves from the costs they ask everyone else to bear. Legitimacy depends partly on the perceived fairness of sacrifice, not merely its absolute size.
Donald Trump has meanwhile warned Iran repeatedly against killing protesters and has publicly expressed support for demonstrators. American pressure may deter some forms of repression if Iranian leaders believe extreme violence could trigger external consequences. But Washington should be extremely careful about moving from supporting political rights towards presenting the demonstrations as an American project for regime change. Iran’s modern political memory includes the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh, decades of hostility with Washington and the Israeli-American attacks of 2025. The regime therefore possesses powerful historical material with which to portray opposition as foreign manipulation. External enthusiasm can unintentionally make domestic protesters easier to delegitimise.
This is where the distinction between liberal universalism and political self-determination becomes important. One can believe Iranians possess rights to political participation, expression and freedom from arbitrary state violence without believing Washington should decide which government replaces the Islamic Republic. If democratic government means anything, its legitimacy ultimately must come from Iranian political agency. A democracy installed or supervised indefinitely by a foreign power would contain the same contradiction I discussed after America’s intervention in Venezuela: self-government cannot genuinely be self-government if outsiders determine the acceptable outcome.
The Iranian opposition itself also faces a difficult question that protest slogans cannot answer: what institutional order follows if the Islamic Republic eventually falls? Opposition to clerical rule contains monarchists, republicans, liberals, leftists, ethnic movements and other groups whose agreement about the existing regime does not imply agreement about a successor. Revolutions often appear politically unified because opposition provides a common objective. Once the old regime disappears, that unity can vanish immediately. The success of any transition would therefore depend not simply on removing existing leaders but on preserving state institutions while creating credible rules through which competing political groups can contest power peacefully.
This is why the fate of Iran should not be analysed as a binary choice between the Islamic Republic surviving and democracy automatically replacing it. There are many possible equilibria between those outcomes, including elite-led reform, harder authoritarianism, military dominance, negotiated transition or disorder. The state itself contains bureaucracies, energy infrastructure, local administration and security institutions that a future government would still require. Destroying authoritarian control without destroying administrative capacity is one of the hardest problems in political transition.
The coming weeks therefore need to be watched with greater analytical discipline than the certainty social media encourages. The number of demonstrators, deaths and arrests matters, but so do quieter indicators: whether bazaars remain closed, whether strikes reach the oil sector, whether provincial elites remain loyal and whether security forces continue obeying orders consistently. Those variables tell us whether Iran is experiencing another severe protest wave or the beginning of a genuine transformation of political authority.
The Islamic Republic may suppress the demonstrations again. If it does, that should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that the system has recovered. Repression can restore order while leaving the underlying legitimacy problem worse. Iran’s younger generations increasingly judge a revolution that occurred almost half a century ago not by what it promised in 1979 but by what its institutions deliver in 2026. That is the unavoidable transition every revolutionary state eventually faces: historical legitimacy depreciates, and performance has to replace it.
Iran’s leaders can shut down the internet, arrest organisers and potentially clear the streets. What they cannot do through coercion alone is answer the question underneath the protests: why should a population continue accepting a political system if it increasingly believes that system cannot deliver either political voice or economic predictability? A government can compel obedience for a long time. The more difficult achievement is creating a political order in which obedience does not need to be compelled quite so often.
