Vahid Yücesoy
Since early May, Iran has been rocked by protests over a precipitous rise in food prices, triggered by the government’s decision to cut existing subsidies on food products. Since then, prices have gone up dramatically, with staples such as imported wheat increasing by up to 300 percent and cooking oil by close to 400 percent. Within a matter of days, protests that sprang up almost simultaneously in the north, east and center of Iran had spread across the country, eventually reaching the capital, Tehran, where bus drivers went on strike.
The rising price of food products are yet another blow for millions of low- and middle-class Iranians already bearing the brunt of years of severe economic mismanagement and corruption by the government. The Trump administration’s decision in 2018 to unilaterally withdraw from the multilateral nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, and reimpose backbreaking economic sanctions deepened the hardships felt by Iranians. The war in Ukraine and the ensuing price hikes for food products have only made things worse.
Protests are not uncommon in Iran. But if the Islamic Republic has faced various ground-breaking protest movements in its more than four decades of existence, the frequency of protests has significantly increased over the past five years. Another notable characteristic of these recent waves of demonstrations is that they have been driven by the country’s urban and rural poor. However, if these protests have all the hallmarks of bread riots and class struggle, the reality is more complex.
A careful examination of the protests of the past several years—and in particular the slogans chanted by people from both provincial cities and towns—reveals an important feature: Protesters are targeting their anger at the entirety of the regime, with chants directed against both Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khameni and President Ebrahim Raisi. The initiators of these protests have also changed compared to previous movements. Most of the people who participated in the Green Movement’s protests against election fraud in 2009, for instance, hailed from the urban middle and upper-middle classes, with scant participation by the lower classes. In contrast, the protests over the past several years have been led by members of the low and lower-middle classes from provincial towns, even if people from the upper and middle classes have been joining them in later phases.
This doesn’t mean that the middle classes are happy with the regime. To the contrary, in Iran, discontent with the regime has been brewing across all walks of life. As the dissident journalist Mohammad Mosaid has noted, “The establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran suffers from a lack of legitimacy. It has failed to fulfill the promises it made 43 years ago like freedom and justice.”
What is noteworthy is that the downtrodden classes in Iran known as the Mostazafin, whom the clerics promised to represent, have now turned into the regime’s fiercest critics. They already participated widely in the 2019 protests, which spread to more than 100 cities and were the most geographically extensive protests in the history of the Islamic Republic. Iranian security forces responded to those demonstration by killing at least 1,500 protesters in a week, while cutting off the internet and disconnecting Iran from the world. Although the regime initially seemed to take back control in the streets, its methods further alienated the protesters, locking the country into a spiral of further confrontations.
What Iran’s recent waves of protest all ultimately share is that they increasingly target the corrupt, inefficient and largely illegitimate theocracy led by the ayatollahs.
Ever since, successive waves of demonstrations—including protests led by teachers and truck drivers, protests over water scarcity and mismanagement, and protests initiated by ethnic groups—have shaken Iran year after year. What they all ultimately share is that they increasingly target the corrupt, inefficient and largely illegitimate theocracy led by the ayatollahs. Even the so-called reformists, once hailed as the democratic alternative to the theocracy’s intractable problems, have become irrelevant actors who no longer command popular backing, due to their inability and unwillingness to support the people and their allegiance, when push comes to shove, to the regime.
In general, authoritarian regimes, despite making abundant use of their coercive security apparatus, also need to buy the acquiescence of a certain stratum of the population to rule while repressing the rest. In the case of Iran, the Mostazafin were once a base of support for the regime, in part because the country’s oil and gas revenues previously enabled the regime to buy the loyalty of the poorest segments of the population through subsidies. At their peak in 2010, food and energy subsidies totaled more than $100 billion a year, out of a government budget of $347 billion. Since then, subsidies were gradually phased out due to the successive waves of sanctions imposed on the country. They were replaced with cash payouts whose value evaporated due to inflation, leaving Khamenei’s regime scrambling to keep the restive poor under control.
The regime’s coercive apparatus seems to be the only tool left in the clerics’ toolkit, one they use liberally to quell any unrest. And that is unlikely to change soon. Recently, the government more than doubled the budget of the Revolutionary Guards, which have been used extensively to put down anti-regime protests in many parts of the country.
The regime has been banking on rising oil prices to help boost the economy, buying it time—and a stronger bargaining position—in negotiations to revive the JCPOA. The lifting of U.S. sanctions in the event an agreement on the JCPOA is reached would further boost the government’s fiscal prospects. But reviving the nuclear deal is far from guaranteed, and even if the sanctions were lifted, the main problem and root causes of the current state of affairs—namely the Iranian leadership’s corruption and the incompetence—would remain.
In the meantime, by investing in coercion rather than in the immediate needs of its population, the regime is paving the way for more protests in the long term, even if it manages to quell protests in the short term. The more the regime represses these protests without addressing the root causes of the problem, the more likely further protests will crop up elsewhere in the country at the earliest opportunity. This was true in the wake of the bloody 2019 protests, and it still holds true today. The ongoing protests this time around will probably not spell the end of the regime, but they will undoubtedly deepen public anger against all its factions.
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