Anti-Government Protests in Iran During December 2025/January 2026: Preliminary Observations
The value of Iran’s weakening national currency, the Rial, plummeted to record lows in December 2025, following decades of mismanagement of the domestic economy and the compounding effects of international economic sanctions. The exchange rate reached 1, 457,000 Iranian Rials to one US dollar on 16 January 2026, rendering the Rial worthless and wiping out its purchasing power in global markets. Responding to the worsening economic situation, shopkeepers at the Grand Bazaar, a sprawling covered market in Iran’s capital city of Tehran, voluntarily shuttered their businesses on 28 December 2025. Protests erupted on the streets of Tehran the following day and soon spread to cities and towns in all 31 provinces of Iran, in what was being described as the biggest uprising since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Iranian authorities imposed a communications blackout on 8 January 2026, switching off the internet and disabling land lines. The jamming of Starlink terminals followed. Many state media outlets continued to operate on Telegram, an encrypted messaging platform. As of 14 January, “aggregated figures” from the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) confirmed at least 18, 470 arrests and 2, 615 deaths as a result of the nationwide protests. Estimates from sources operating inside Iran indicate that, at the time of writing, between 12,000 and 20,000 Iranians may have lost their lives during the current civil disorder. . Many of the victims of the security forces happen to be young Iranians, in keeping with the demographic profile of a youthful nation, with an average age of 32 years.
As far as we can tell, the protesters in Iran appear to come from a variety of social and political backgrounds, including both right-wing monarchists seeking reinstatement of the Pahlavi dynasty and left-wing supporters of the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran) (MEK). The MEK is a component of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a loose coalition of anti-government parties and organisations that seek regime change in Iran
It must be noted in this context that the Iranian government has successfully seen off various expressions of dissent in the past, including the Mashhad riots of May 1992, the student protests of July 1999, the Green Movement of 2009, the Dey Protests of December 2017/ January 2018, the ‘Bloody November’ uprising of 2019, and the “Woman, Life, and Freedom” movement of 2022.
The resumption of Trump’s “maximum pressure” strategy on Iran in February 2025, to counter “Iran’s malign influence abroad, has further strained already fractious US-Iranian relations. The US has abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear containment deal and has demonstrated its resolve by bombing Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025 during the 12-day war between Iran and Israel. The United Nations thereafter reimposed economic sanctions on Iran in September 2025, after the UN Security Council voted against lifting them.
Western governments have responded as they have on many occasions before, with damning condemnation of Iranian actions, threats of further economic sanctions on the nation and individual sanctions on selected officials, and the contemplation of cyberattacks and other forms of remotely-controlled attacks on the nation, while at the same time emphasising the need for diplomatic negotiation. Iran has, meanwhile, adopted a defiant posture, setting up a war of words in which both sides have resorted to inflammatory rhetoric, including threats of deadly revenge on each other.
President Trump promised “very strong action” if the large-scale executions of anti-government protesters were to continue. He later put a hold on proposed military intervention, reassured that executions were “stopping”, although it seems more likely that pressure from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, and other allies may have held him back from potentially destabilising the Persian Gulf region, causing a spike in global oil prices, and precipitating a full-blown war in the event of American airstrikes on Iran. The key regional players, out of seven countries that share land borders with Iran and a further six countries with shared maritime borders, currently do not support American intervention in Iran. Meanwhile, Russia and China have declared their unqualified support for Iran. The opposition is fragmented and the only widely-known opposition figure to garner any international support happens to be Reza Pahlavi, the uncharismatic scion of the discredited Pahlavi dynasty (set up by Reza Shah in 1925, who was deposed by the Allies in 1941 for aligning himself with Nazi Germany), who serves as a figurehead for the anti-regime Iranian diaspora. This combination of factors makes regime change an unlikely option for the present, especially since targeted airstrikes are unlikely to have a lasting impact without troops on the ground and substantial defections to the opposition from Iran’s security forces to take matters forward.
Iran’s repressive theocracy is under the control of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, an 86-year-old Supreme Leader, elected for life and backed by a loyal and disciplined IRGC, consisting of anywhere between 125,000 and 150,000 elite troops, a 600,000-strong Basij paramilitary force, and a Quds Force that sponsors and supports a network of Iranian proxy terrorist groups in the Middle East. The Ayatollah’s Iranian regime is up against an unpredictable US President, whose strategy appears to be shifting from day to day, sometimes even from hour to hour. All of this has muddied the waters in Iran. How Iran can extract itself out of this quagmire is the million-dollar question. We can accordingly conclude that we have not quite reached the time when Iranians can begin to “Make Iran Great Again.”
Ashis Banerjee