Huge protests spread through several Iranian cities on Tuesday after the national currency, the rial, collapsed to a record low against the U.S. dollar and inflation soared by over 40 percent.
The Associated Press cited reports from the capital city of Tehran, plus the cities Isfahan, Shiraz, and Mashhad, that described the protests as the largest since the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement of 2022. That movement began with the death of a young Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s infamous “morality police” after she was detained for allegedly wearing her mandatory headscarf improperly.
The new protests, which reportedly broke out from universities and spread to merchant districts across Iran, were prompted by the value of the rial falling to about 1.42 million per U.S. dollar. The rial was trading at 430,000 to the dollar when Iranian central bank chief Mohammad Reza Farzin took office in 2022.
Iranian state media reports said Farzin resigned on Monday, but the protests did not subside. Many businessmen closed their shops in protest of the currency collapse and high inflation rates. General inflation rose 1.8 percent to 42.4 percent in December, but food inflation was dramatically higher, hitting 72 percent last month.
Another cause of the unrest was a report that the government is planning a major tax hike for March, which is the beginning of the new year on the Iranian calendar.
The regime reportedly tried suppressing the protests with its usual brute-force tactics, sending militarized police to break up street marches in Tehran with tear gas and batons – but the demonstrators actually drove security forces back with deafening chants of “Shameless! Shameless!”
An especially dramatic showdown occurred on Tehran’s Jomhouri Street on Tuesday, when a crowd of determined protesters faced down both the police and the Basij, the brutal militia dispatched by the regime to beat and kill dissidents.
A lone protester clad in black parked himself in the middle of the street and refused to budge when motorcycle police rolled in, prompting comparisons to the famous “Tank Man” who faced down Chinese tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Unfortunately, Motorcycle Man was later beaten and dragged off by security forces for his troubles.
The protesters rallied each other with chants of “Have no fear, we are all together” and “Death to the dictator!” as they filled bazaars and shopping centers to protest the high cost of living. The dictator in question would be Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran.
State media strove to downplay the size of the demonstrations and blame tiny “cells” of “five to ten individuals” for chanting the most provocative slogans.
One of the more provocative chants was “Rest in peace, Reza Shah,” a reference to the late monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was deposed by the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Nostalgia for the Shah’s rule has become a popular means of expressing displeasure with the grim theocracy that replaced him.
The shah’s son and crown prince, also named Reza Pahlavi, expressed support for the protests on Monday, and he was not shy about calling for the downfall of the ayatollahs as the only solution for Iran’s ills.
“As long as this regime remains in power, the country’s economic situation will continue to deteriorate,” he said on social media in a salute to the protesters.
“Today is a time for greater solidarity. I call on all segments of society to join your fellow citizens in the streets and raise your voices demanding the downfall of this system,” he said.
Pahlavi added a “special message” for Iranian security forces and police: “This regime is collapsing. Do not stand against the people. Join the people.”
By Monday afternoon, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence was trying to frame the protests as the work of foreign governments and seditious provocateurs who sought to “turn economic grievances into political instability.”
Sensing that a murderous crackdown might not work, the head of the inferior secular wing of Iranian government, President Masoud Pezeshkian – who was elected on a “moderate” platform of listening to the concerns of the people – announced on social media that he asked the interior ministry to hear the “legitimate demands” of the demonstrators.
“We officially recognize the protests,” said a spokeswoman for Pezeshkian’s administration. “We hear their voices and we know that this originates from natural pressure arising from the pressure on people’s livelihoods.”
On the other hand, Iranian judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei on Monday vowed to “pursue and punish” demonstrators who “disrupt” the nation’s economy.
“Those who, knowingly or unknowingly, put added pressure on people and their livelihoods and effectively move in the direction of the enemy’s objectives must be cautioned,” he said, adopting the general government line that the protests are largely the work of foreign adversaries.
Ejei made a point of citing Iran’s laws against “corruption on earth,” an all-purpose crime that can be punished by death.
The rial protests are the latest in a series of uprisings to hit Iran since the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement seemed on the cusp of affecting real change in 2022. People have taken to the streets after the incompetence of the theocracy left Tehran on the verge of a deadly water crisis, after a switch to cheaper fuels filled the skies of Iran’s cities with suffocating smog, after the regime suffered a string of embarrassing military defeats from Syria to Israel, and after various dissidents were executed on sketchy charges of treason.
The regime has survived each of these political crises, but optimistic reformers say each of them has weakened the Islamic Republic’s grip on power, and the next uprising could be the one to topple it.
Iran also faces a ticking clock in the declining health of Ayatollah Khamenei, who went into hiding during Iran’s recent conflicts with Israel and has rarely been seen in public since. Khamenei’s death, and the ensuing succession crisis, could be the last straw. Khamenei can be given some credit for hanging in there – he is now 86 years old and has been in poor health for over a decade – but the power struggle to replace him seems to be well underway.
Iran expert Beni Sabti told the Times of London on Tuesday that most previous unrest was in rural areas where it could be downplayed and ignored by the regime, but today’s demonstrations are happening in downtown Tehran, and they involve a “lethal combination” of students and middle-class businessmen that frightens the theocracy.
Sabti was among the analysts who said Iran’s string of defeats over the past two years have made the regime look “weak.”
“Ultimately, it is the economy that can bring this regime down. The day people cannot afford bread and basic necessities, they will inevitably come to the streets. We are now witnessing something very significant,” said British-Iranian activist Ellie Borhan.
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