Iran is experiencing some of its most active dissent in years. Citizens are irate about the poor state of the economy, but are also lashing out at the regime itself. In The Spectator, Mani Basharzad notes that Iranians are not just angry with what they have for leadership, but have in mind an idea for change. That idea is the restoration of the country’s monarchy under Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. Basharzad writes:
There are protests in Iran again. But this time, something is different. In the uprisings of 2019, 2022 and 2023, the dominant slogan was negative: what Iranians did not want. ‘Death to the dictator’ echoed through the streets. Today, the country has moved beyond rejection. Now there is affirmation. A name is being chanted: Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.
More than ten Iranian cities have risen up in recent days, from the most conservative quarters of society to elite universities. Across Iranian cities one hears slogans: ‘Pahlavi will return’, ‘Javid Shah’ – the Persian equivalent of ‘Long live the King’ – and simply, ‘King Reza Pahlavi’. For the first time since the revolution, Iranians are not merely denouncing a regime; they are articulating an alternative.
What does the renewed popularity of the Pahlavi name signify? Some context is helfpul. Last year, the Crown Prince, the son of Iran’s last Shah visited Britain, where he met Boris Johnson, David Cameron and Nigel Farage. In 2023, he travelled to Israel and met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is a remarkable vibe change for a country whose ruling ideology is premised on the destruction of Israel and names the street on which the British embassy is based Bobby Sands Street, after the IRA hunger-striker who died in a Northern Irish prison in the 1980s.
Iranians are once again resisting what Scruton called ‘the tyranny of evil mullahs’
The message Iranians are sending is disarmingly simple: we want to return to normality. They want an end to the madness imposed by an Islamic dictatorship that has isolated Iran from the world and from itself. Normality means peaceful relations abroad and civic peace at home. It means an Iran that does not define itself through permanent revolution.
The Islamic Republic has, from its inception, defined itself against the West – from the seizure of the US embassy in 1979 to the routine arrest of British nationals simply for being British. This is not incidental excess; it is ideological design.
The regime’s propaganda machine insists on reducing the current unrest to economics. Inflation, it is true, has devastated Iran. Forty-five years ago, one US dollar was worth seven tomans. Today it exceeds 145,000 – and can fluctuate by as much as 25 per cent in a single day. A devaluation like the 1992-pound crisis is just a normal day in Iran’s economy.
But this explanation collapses under scrutiny. The protests did not originate in universities or among radical students, but in the bazaar – the most conservative segment of Iranian society. Shopkeepers, traders, ordinary businesses. When the bazaar chants ‘God Save the King’, this is not an economic protest. It is a profoundly political one. When the most conservative strata of society demand regime change, the regime’s legitimacy has collapsed and can’t be fixed with economic policy.
Read more here.
