2025-26 Iranian Protests

The 2025-26 protests were Iran's largest domestic uprising since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, spreading across more than 100 cities as accelerating currency devaluation made basic goods inaccessible for millions of working-class families. They were the fourth major protest cycle since 2009, following the Green Movement, the 2019 fuel-price demonstrations, and the 2022-23 Mahsa Amini protests triggered by a young woman's death in morality police custody.

By the time military strikes began in 2026, the protests had already demonstrated that coercive capacity alone could not restore the government's popular legitimacy. That pre-existing rupture between state and society shaped how Iranians inside the country received both the strikes and Tehran's wartime narrative: a government asking a population it had been suppressing to rally around the flag.

The protests embody an unresolved question about the Islamic Republic's long-term viability: whether a regime that must choose between economic reform and ideological rigidity can survive sustained popular dissent without the safety valve of prosperity. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) remained the dominant instrument of internal suppression across all four cycles, creating a direct continuity between protest repression and the wartime security apparatus.