Key messages
- Iran has ended 2025 and entered 2026 facing another significant wave of popular protests, triggered primarily by acute economic deterioration and a renewed collapse of the national currency. As in earlier cycles, demonstrations began with sectoral and socio-economic demands and gradually incorporated political slogans questioning the performance and legitimacy of the ruling elite.
- While the protests of 2025-26 are the most extensive since the Mahsa Amini movement of 2022, their intensity, organisational coherence and political articulation remain uneven. Despite their scale, the protests have not yet produced the conditions necessary for systemic transformation, as expected and desired by some external actors and the Iranian opposition in exile.
- The response of the Iranian state has combined selective repression, economic signalling and political containment, reflecting lessons drawn from previous protest cycles. As with earlier episodes, the resilience and adaptability of the Islamic Republic’s institutions suggest continuity in the short to medium term, despite mounting structural pressures.
Analysis
The historical background of protests in Iran
Popular protest has been a recurring feature of Iranian political life well before and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. From the Tobacco Revolt of 1890 and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11 to the nationalist mobilisation of the early 1950s and the revolutionary upheaval of 1978-79, street politics have repeatedly functioned as a mechanism through which society challenged state authority. The establishment of the Islamic Republic led by the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 did not eliminate this dynamic; rather, it institutionalised a political order that has been periodically contested through demonstrations, strikes and riots. Since then, major protest episodes have included the student demonstrations of 1999, the Green Movement of 2009 and a series of recurrent socio-economic uprisings since 2017 until today. These episodes reveal a pattern in which economic grievances, political exclusion and perceptions of injustice converge, while the state responds through a mixture of repression, selective accommodation and elite reconfiguration. The durability of the system has rested less on the absence of dissent than on its capacity to manage and fragment it.
The first two mentioned protest movements, 1999 and 2009, were driven predominantly, though not exclusively, by educated, urban middle-class constituencies, particularly students, professionals and reform-minded voters, rather than by the more economically underprivileged or popular classes that would become more visible in later protest cycles. In 1999 mobilisation was triggered by the closure of the reformist newspaper Salam and centred on university campuses, where students protested restrictions on press freedom and political reform before being violently suppressed by the security forces. In 2009 the so-called Green Movement emerged in response to the contested re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with mass demonstrations –especially in Tehran– demanding electoral accountability under the slogan ‘Where is my vote?’.
The protests of December 2017-January 2018 marked a turning point by spreading rapidly from the small town of Neyshabur (Mashad province), reaching Tehran and other major urban centres, and by articulating slogans that criticised the political elite as a whole. Although rooted in economic hardship, these demonstrations signalled a declining confidence in the reformist and pragmatic factions by then holding the presidency. Two years later, the November 2019 protests sparked by a sudden, although expected, increase in fuel prices, was the most violent episode of unrest since 1979, prompting an unprecedented security response, widespread Internet shutdowns and hundreds of deaths.
Both cycles demonstrated that economic shocks could rapidly evolve into political crises, but also that the state was willing and able to deploy coercive tools decisively when it perceived an existential threat. Despite the recognition by the pragmatist President Hassan Rouhani (2013-21) of the legitimate economic grievances that triggered the protests and the citizens’ right to demonstrate publicly in the streets, there was a heavy repression of both protests that temporarily restored order but deepened social mistrust and widened the gap between state and society.
The protests that erupted after the death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 differed from earlier cycles in both symbolism and duration. Centred on bodily autonomy, civil rights and opposition to coercive social control, they mobilised women and younger urban cohorts on an unprecedented scale. Although ultimately contained, the 2022 protests left a lasting imprint on Iranian society, normalising more explicit challenges to the ideological foundations of the system and further eroding the credibility of official narratives.
Crucially, however, the 2022 movement did not produce a unified leadership inside Iran, a coherent political programme or a split internal elite capable of translating protest into institutional change. Neither was the opposition in exile –mainly the former Prince Reza Pahlavi– able to capitalise the protest due to its lack of unity and legitimacy within the country. These limitations would resurface in subsequent mobilisations.
The 2025-26 protests: causes and dynamics
The current wave of protests began in late December 2025 amid a sharp depreciation of the rial, accelerating inflation and declining purchasing power. The Iranian currency drastically dropped from 1.07 million Riyal per US$ in early November, to 1.4 million by 28 December. Initial demonstrations were led by bazaar merchants, small business owners and wage earners, particularly in urban centres. As protests spread geographically, students and segments of the urban middle class joined, echoing patterns observed in earlier economic protest cycles.
While economic grievances remain central, political slogans such as ‘death to the dictator’ or ‘long live the Shah’ have increasingly appeared, criticising corruption, mismanagement and the concentration of power. Nevertheless, the movement still lacks a unified ideological frame, leadership structure or clear objectives. Unlike 2022, identity-based and rights-centred claims are less prominent; unlike 2019, the level of violence has remained comparatively limited, despite the recent alarming figures showing an increasing number of casualties as regards both protestors and security forces. So far, it is safe to say that the protests occupy an intermediate position between previous cycles, combining socio-economic urgency with cautious political expression.
This present 2025-26 protest wave can be more productively understood not as a discrete episode comparable in scale or symbolism to 2019 or 2022, but as an iterative stress test applied to the governing capacity of the Islamic Republic. Each protest cycle since 2017 has functioned as a diagnostic moment, revealing different vulnerabilities of the system: economic distributive failure in 2017-19, coercive moral governance in 2022 and macroeconomic exhaustion combined with sanction fatigue in 2025-26. What distinguishes the current protests is not their novelty, but their cumulative nature: they occur in a context where neither society nor the state expects decisive resolution.
Unlike revolutionary moments, which are characterised by escalating expectations and converging demands, the current protests are marked by a notable absence of teleology. Protesters articulate grievances without projecting a shared end-state, while the state responds without advancing a reformist horizon. This mutual absence of a future-oriented narrative reinforces political stasis rather than rupture.
The economic backdrop of the 2025-26 protests reflects not merely cyclical crisis but structural degradation. Inflation, currency collapse and a declining purchasing power have become normalised features of everyday life, eroding not only material welfare but also temporal expectations. Protest in this context is less an expression of hope for imminent change than a manifestation of exhaustion.
Whereas earlier economic protests were driven by sudden shocks –fuel prices in 2019, unpaid wages in 2017– the current unrest is rooted in the perception that decline is permanent, and no improvement is visible on the horizon due to the existing structural constrains added to the renewed sanctions and the perception that Iran is an a very defensive and delicate position vis a vis its enemies. The political implications of permanent crisis differ from those of acute disruption: they favour sporadic mobilisation, low organisational density and rapid demobilisation once repression or partial concessions occur.
State learning and the institutionalisation of containment
The Islamic Republic’s response to the 2025-26 protests suggests, so far, a further institutionalisation of what can be termed ‘containment governance’. Rather than oscillating between reformist accommodation and hard repression, the state increasingly relies on a calibrated toolkit: selective coercion, technocratic reshuffling, controlled narrative framing and temporal dispersion of protests through fatigue. The death penalty threats of Ali Khamenei and the General Prosecutor to the protestors and the conciliatory words expressed by President Pezeshkian calling for dialogue reaffirm the mixed approach that reflects lessons drawn from both the 2019 and 2022 protests. The heavy-handed repression of 2019 restored order but inflicted reputational and legitimacy costs both domestically and internationally. The prolonged coercive campaign of 2022 contained dissent but normalised defiance. In contrast, the current strategy aims to prevent escalation altogether by keeping protest intensity below a critical threshold.
A defining feature of the 2025-26 protests is the persistence of social fragmentation. Bazaaris, students, salaried workers and peripheral urban groups participate intermittently, but their demands are not aggregated into a shared political platform. This fragmentation reflects long-term structural changes in Iranian society, including labour informality, generational segmentation and the erosion of intermediary institutions.
The weakness of protest leadership should therefore not be interpreted solely as the result of repression. It is also the consequence of a society in which collective action has become episodic and transactional rather than programmatic. Protest serves as a mechanism of expression rather than organisation. Normalisation of protests has been discussed extensively since 2017 as a mechanism of dissent rather than a revolutionary momentum that preludes regime change.
Although international reactions, particularly from the US, have accompanied the 2025-26 protests, their effect on domestic dynamics has been limited. External rhetorical support has not translated into internal political leverage, and in some cases has reinforced the state’s securitised framing of dissent. The relative silence of actors such as China and the cautious positioning of the EU underscore a broader trend: international actors increasingly view Iranian protests as endogenous phenomena unlikely to produce short-term transformation.
The endurance of the Islamic Republic amid recurring protests should not be conflated with legitimacy renewal. Stability has been maintained through control, fragmentation and adaptation rather than consent. The 2025-26 protests reinforce this distinction. The system persists not because grievances are resolved, but because they are managed.
Policy implications for the EU
From an EU perspective, the 2025-26 protests in Iran reinforce several policy-relevant lessons already identified after the 2022 Mahsa Amini movement. First, recurring protest cycles underline that social unrest in Iran is structural rather than episodic. Economic sanctions, while intended to alter state behaviour, continue to interact with domestic mismanagement in ways that disproportionately affect Iranian society and fuel instability.
Secondly, the calibrated response of the Iranian authorities in 2025-26 –avoiding the scale of repression seen in 2019 while containing mobilisation– suggests that the system has internalised the costs of excessive coercion. EU human rights diplomacy therefore faces a familiar dilemma: condemnation and symbolic sanctions may satisfy normative commitments, but they have a limited impact on regime behaviour in the absence of a broader geopolitical leverage.
Third, the protests highlight the absence of credible internal political intermediaries capable of channelling social discontent into institutional change. For the EU, continued engagement with Iranian civil society, academic networks and people-to-people exchanges –where still possible– remain one of the few instruments to mitigate long-term societal isolation. Expectations of rapid political transformation should therefore be tempered.
On the other hand, repeated threats of military intervention by President Trump not only risk harming the very Iranian population they purport to defend but also undermine the possibility of a coordinated transatlantic approach with the EU aimed at preserving stability and, more importantly, protecting civilian lives.
Conclusions
The 2025-26 protests in Iran are a continuation rather than a rupture in the country’s cycle of contention. They share key characteristics with earlier movements –economic triggers, rapid diffusion, limited leadership and eventual containment– while reflecting the accumulated grievances of a society under prolonged pressure. Despite their scale, the protests have not yet produced the conditions necessary for systemic transformation, as expected and desired by some external actors and the Iranian opposition in exile.
The resilience of the Islamic Republic lies not in the absence of dissent but in its capacity to manage it. Unless future mobilisations coincide with sustained elite fragmentation or profound economic collapse, the political system is likely to endure, adapting once again to a familiar challenge.
