Officials of Iran’s regime and state media outlets have been growing increasingly worried about the threat that the Iranian people pose the regime’s existence. The clerical regime has been deeply unpopular for its entire existence, but that unpopularity has become uniquely difficult to deny in recent years. There are two basic reasons for this. Firstly, public expressions of dissent reached nearly unprecedented levels of intensity after 2017. And secondly, the conditions of life in Iran have grown worse while Tehran has resisted all changes of policy or behavior that might alleviate the situation. Such as funding terrorist organization and mullahs’ institutionalized corruption.
Of course, these two trends go hand-in-hand. The people’s poverty and deprivation fuel their outrage at the regime’s economic mismanagement and misplaced spending. Then the regime’s failure to address those grievances reinforces the public sentiment and confirms this fact that relief will only be found under a new government. Indeed, this sentiment has been made explicit in two nationwide uprisings, as well as countless smaller-scale protests and activist demonstrations. In the final days of 2017, protest was sparked by a series of worsening economic indicators, and by the end of January 2018, residents of nearly 150 cities and towns were chanting slogans like “death to the dictator.”
The same slogans returned to nationwide prominence in November 2019, with follow-up protests in some 200 localities. The second uprising marked clear defiance of the regime’s efforts to stamp out dissent in the previous year. Dozens of participants in the 2018 uprising were shot dead by security forces, and several were tortured to death. Thousands of others were arrested, and sentences are still being implemented more than two and a half years later. Now, they are being implemented right alongside harsh sentences for participation in the November uprising, and the judiciary has signaled clear intent to execute the detained protesters, if possible, to further intimidate the public and thwart looming uprisings.
Last month, Iranian social media users initiated a campaign to prevent these executions. A Farsi hashtag that translates to “do not execute” was used more than 12 million times, and the judiciary was forced to announce that three most prominent cases being reexamined again. This actions, which was only meant to prevent the society from explosion, was a small victory that Iranians are sure to embrace, but in the face of current circumstances, no one believes that Tehran is going to meaningfully soften its approach, least of all after its crackdown on the 2019 uprising outpaced the previous crackdown by several orders of magnitude.
In a matter of only days last November, the IRGC oversaw the shooting deaths of over 1,500 people. Amnesty International issued statements at the time which affirmed that authorities were “shooting to kill.” And this repression was motivated by an edict from regime Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei giving the green light to “whatever it takes to end” the unrest. The shootings and arrests served their purpose, albeit only for a brief time. By January, protesters were gathering simultaneously across multiple provinces once again, once again demanding regime change.
In the wake of this escalating back-and-forth between public unrest and regime’s repression, the social media activity opposing the death penalty can be seen as more of a symbol of persistent defiance than a good-faith appeal for action from a vicious regime which holds the record of execution per capita. In fact, the regime’s officials and state media have acknowledged this. In recent weeks, a number of editorials have appeared in those outlets warning about the near-inevitability of further uprisings. Some even go so far as to warn that these could lead to the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime.
The potential mechanism of that overthrow is no secret. Even Khamenei himself acknowledged at the height of the 2018 uprising that the unrest was being guided primarily by the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI / MEK). MEK has been the trailblazer of struggle for regime change and democratic governance since the very early days of the 1979 anti-monarchic revolution, and its popularity has grown by leaps and bounds as more and more Iranians have come face-to-face with the regime’s disinterest in safeguarding their welfare. The ongoing MEK’s “Resistance Units” activities confirms the strength and presence of this movement inside Iran.
Perhaps nothing has revealed people’s hatred toward the regime more clearly than the coronavirus pandemic, which has hit Iran much more heavily than any other country in the region. Leaked documents indicate that by the time Tehran acknowledged the existence of domestic outbreaks, they had been active for well over a month. Yet it would not be until several weeks later that the regime supreme leader finally agreed to release one billion dollars from the country’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, to help combat the disease. This he did begrudgingly, and to date the Health Ministry reports receiving only about a third of the sum, while the public has been given practically no assistance at all to cope with the outbreak’s effect on the economy.
The MEK quickly raised very effective campaign against this situation, noting that Khamenei personally controls literally hundreds of billions of dollars in assets through state-linked institutions and “charitable foundations.” Yet nearly every penny of this wealth has been retained for use in the support of regional terrorism and the financing of authorities that will be tasked with putting down future protests, rather than being redirected toward public services that might prevent those protests from emerging in the first place.
If the pandemic did not change Tehran’s commitment to these misplaced priorities, it is difficult to imagine that anything else will. Thus, media outlets like the Etemad and Asre Iran daily newspapers have begun urging authorities to reconsider their position, lest another, even more intensive anti-regime uprising becomes unavoidable.
When those authorities fail to heed the advice, they will surely respond to renewed unrest with extreme violence. This, too, seems unavoidable. But in view of how little of a long-term impact that violence has had on Iranian activism so far, the regime change is on the horizon for Iran.
