As anti-government protests gain momentum in Iran, one question looms above all else: Will the latest round of protests finally topple the country’s theocratic regime, which has ruled the country with an iron fist for nearly half a century? Or will the government once again use force to snuff out this hint of revolution?
On the one hand, we’ve seen this movie before: There was the 2009 Green Movement, which drew millions of disaffected Iranians into the streets demanding a recount after a rigged presidential election. Then came the protests of 2017 and 2019, and finally the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising in 2022, sparked by the killing of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman in the custody of the morality police. Each time, the pattern repeated itself. Within days, security and riot police brutally quashed the protests. In 2022 alone, government forces arrested and imprisoned some 20,000 protesters, killed nearly 600, and hanged several others.
On the other hand, five major signs distinguish the current protests from the previous efforts.
1. The Spark. The protests began in Tehran’s old market, known as the Grand Bazaar. To Americans, a bazaar may conjure images of an outdoor mall. But Tehran’s Grand Bazaar is something else entirely: a powerful institution with a long tradition of political activism, and the seat of the country’s wealthier and more religiously conservative classes. In 1978, it was the Bazaar that bankrolled Ayatollah Khomeini and helped fuel the Islamic Revolution that overthrew Iran’s last monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. That the current protests originated in the same Bazaar is therefore telling. It signals that even the regime’s most dependable and historically loyal supporters have turned against it.
