The mood on Iran’s streets seems to be desperation rather than hope

1 day ago 3

“I hope all of us in the streets can remove this evil, lying and criminal regime from the cycle of politics and decision-making forever. May the mullahs, the criminal Khamenei and the terrorist army fall and Iran be free!”

This is the final message I received last week from my friend Soheila Hejab, a young Kurdish-Iranian lawyer who had befriended me in 2020, during my imprisonment in Iran. Soheila has already spent years behind bars for her human rights advocacy, and in the past suffered violent beatings at the hands of her captors. This didn’t deter her from taking to the streets once more, alongside thousands of her fellow compatriots in fresh anti-regime demonstrations that broke out in Iran on December 28.

A few days ago, I learnt that Soheila had been arrested at a protest in the city of Karaj. She is being held in Kachuei Prison. Before her arrest, Soheila gave me permission to write about her anti-government activism using her real name. For activists like Soheila, international media attention helps protect them against abuse and mistreatment in custody.

For the past 10 days, social media has once again been awash with clips of young Iranians chanting slogans like “Death to the dictator” and “We fight, we die, we take back Iran”. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” slogan is popular too, a reference to the unprecedented wave of protests which roiled Iran following the death in custody of Mahsa Jina Amini, a young Kurdish woman, in 2022. Some protesters added to this “Man, homeland, prosperity”, underscoring the economic concerns which provided the initial trigger for the current unrest.

Another refrain that has made a comeback is “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon, my life for Iran”, a popular protest chant in times past which takes on a special relevance in the wake of Israel’s 12-day war with Iran just six months earlier. Iranians have long resented the billions of dollars the Islamic Republic has poured into propping up terrorist proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine and Yemen at the expense of economic development at home. Despite the country’s deep-rooted economic malaise, the Iranian regime reportedly transferred $1 billion to Lebanese Hezbollah in 2025 alone, as the terror group attempts to rebuild after its own war with Israel.

This latest round of popular protest was triggered by a catastrophic collapse of the Iranian rial, which has lost more than 50 per cent of its value against the US dollar in the past six months. Currency traders and bazaar merchants went on strike in the capital Tehran, and protests quickly spread throughout most of Iran’s major cities and provinces.

Inflation in Iran is now at 42.2 per cent. The cost of basic foodstuffs has risen by an average of 72 per cent and the cost of medicine has increased by 50 per cent. While some of Iran’s economic crisis can be attributed to the sanctions which the country has operated under for decades, many Iranians blame the regime’s widespread corruption and economic mismanagement for the severe degradation in their living conditions.

Under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his predecessor Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran has fallen from a prosperous middle power before the 1979 revolution to an economic basket-case. The Islamic Republic’s own data estimates that 30 per cent of the population has been pushed below the poverty line; the actual numbers are probably far higher.

For decades, regime elites have treated the state as their personal fiefdom, siphoning off the country’s vast oil and gas reserves to enrich and reward close family members and loyal cronies. The Revolutionary Guard, a military force within Iran tasked with defending the Islamic Revolution against internal and external threats, has made billions out of the sanctions, developing monopolies over entire industries and trading oil extensively on the black market. As in Venezuela, the people of Iran face impoverishment while a small group of regime insiders plunders the country’s vast resource wealth with impunity.

But the vibe of the protests feels different this time. The 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement was characterised by a sense of hope that, just maybe, the unprecedented numbers of people on the streets might topple the regime. The Iranian diaspora was galvanised, and Iranians abroad furiously lobbied foreign governments to further crack down on the regime as well as do more to support the domestic protest movement.

Heroes emerged, such as dissident rapper Toomaj Salehi, whose defiant lyrics saw him imprisoned, tortured and briefly sentenced to death, and singer Shervin Hajipour, whose ballad Baraye became the movement’s unofficial anthem. Murdered protesters became household names, among them nine-year-old Kian Pirfalak, who was shot dead by security forces and whose sweet phrase “in the name of the God of rainbows” went viral throughout the country.

The mood on the streets in Iran today seems to be characterised by a sense of desperation rather than hope. The protests themselves, while significant, have not come close to the scale or extent of those of three years earlier. The diaspora, exhausted from years of advocacy, is now preoccupied with infighting, in particular over the role the son of the deposed Shah, Reza Pahlavi, should play in a democratic transition, forgetting that the hard work of actually removing the regime is yet to begin.

Will the Islamic Republic survive the current unrest and continue to hold on to power? My sense is yes, it will, although as we have seen in recent years, the Middle East is a highly volatile and unpredictable place, and Khamenei’s regime is clearly teetering. Israel’s successful campaign of bombings and assassinations in June 2025, and the joint US-Israeli attack on the country’s nuclear program, have reduced the Islamic Republic’s domestic legitimacy to threadbare, at the same time that the regime watches its “axis of resistance” regional proxies in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza crumble at the hands of those same forces.

The Iranian regime has proven itself again and again to be more resilient to internal unrest than might be expected. Surveys have shown that up to 80 per cent of Iran’s population want the regime gone, yet while the Revolutionary Guard and other security forces continue to hold all the guns, and have no compunction about using them, the cycle of protest and repression feels doomed to repeat itself.

There is still hope. It is now almost inconceivable to think that Khamenei and his Islamist cronies will continue to rule Iran into the medium term. As we saw during the Arab Spring, and more recently with the Assad regime in Syria, rapid shifts in the regional balance of power can trigger the swift downfall of long-established dictatorships which have lost the support of their people.

For now, young protesters like my friend Soheila Hejab will continue to take to the streets, facing violence, imprisonment and even death, hoping to create that spark which will somehow trigger the downfall of the Islamic Republic, and with it the opportunity to build the kind of Iran that its brave and long-suffering people so richly deserve.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert is an academic in Middle Eastern political science at Macquarie University, the author of memoir The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison and a regular columnist.

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