Iran’s latest wave of protests did not begin as a romantic revolution. It started as an economic alarm — a warning flare from the country’s commercial heart, where shopkeepers and bazaar merchants shuttered their doors as the rial plunged to record lows. Within days, a market shock evolved into a national political crisis. The driver is not any single policy or politician, but a deeper collision between a long-simmering sociopolitical transformation and a rigid, exhausted state apparatus.

In this collision, four constituencies — followers of the Islamic Republic, monarchists, nationalist intellectuals and pragmatic fence-sitters — are shaping events in real time. Yet only one of them — the small circle of nationalist intellectuals inside and outside the country — consistently grasps both Iran’s internal mechanics of change and the external traps that can turn upheaval into catastrophe.

The protests continue amid intense repression. The unrest is unfolding amid a violent crackdown, mass arrests and tight restrictions on communications, conditions that paralyze coordination while fueling rumors and fear. At the same time, international watchdogs warn of escalating violations, including deaths and serious injuries linked to protest crackdowns. Movements, however, do not triumph by courage alone; enduring change requires strategy — coalition-building, disciplined nonviolence, credible leadership and a realistic path from street anger to a new political order.

Ideological followers of the Islamic Republic

The ruling order’s core supporters — clerical elites, paramilitary networks and segments of the bureaucracy — prefer the status quo not solely from conviction, but because their livelihoods and authority depend on it. In a sanctions-strangled economy, loyalty buys access: licenses, credit, contracts and import channels that sustain a patronage system. That system is reinforced by the growing economic dominance of security-linked networks that control key trade and commerce.

For this group, reform is a contagion — each concession risks normalizing dissent. Their instinct is to frame protests as foreign-instigated, divide opposition networks and raise the human cost of participation through arrests, intimidation and exemplary punishment. Even as repression intensifies, the UN has publicly urged Iranian authorities to end violent repression and halt death sentences linked to protests.

Monarchists in and out of Iran

The monarchist bloc commands a potent emotional resource — nostalgia — but remains strategically adrift. It promises a “return” to a pre-1979 Iran that younger generations barely remember, invoking an era of prosperity and international connectivity that, in practice, benefited only segments of society. Some prominent figures in exile portray this moment as a final rupture and push for escalatory measures, including sharper external pressure and regime-change language, as reflected in recent monarchist-aligned commentary in the Financial Times.

Such appeals may resonate in diaspora echo chambers, but they are often detached from the daily calculations of Iranians who must navigate shortages, sanctions and security risks. For citizens inside the country, the questions are immediate: Will there be work tomorrow? Will sanctions deepen? Will the protest invite a crackdown in my neighborhood? The region offers sobering lessons. When foreign powers perceive domestic upheaval as an opportunity, they tend to instrumentalize internal unrest for their own security agendas — leaving the society to absorb the long-term costs.

Nationalist intellectuals

The smallest of the four groups — nationalist intellectuals — is also the most strategically grounded. They consist of reform-minded academics, professionals, writers and civic voices who argue that Iran’s pathway from theocracy to eventual democracy must be domestic, carefully sequenced and insulated from militarized “solutions.” Their case is not theoretical. It rests on a hard reading of how quickly protest environments can be pulled into wider confrontation — and how easily outside “assistance” can become outside control.

Nationalist intellectuals also understand Iran’s regional entanglements. A sudden collapse of state authority in a country of Iran’s scale would not stay within its borders; it would reverberate through Iraq, the Gulf and the wider neighborhood, intensifying proxy competition, militia politics and displacement pressures. That risk is why international officials have expressed alarm at mounting violence against protesters: repression can radicalize streets, while uncontrolled escalation can fracture the state.

These voices warn that overt military intervention or covert political engineering would deepen the regime’s siege mentality and fracture an already diverse opposition. Their realism is sometimes miscast as timidity. In fact, it reflects an insistence on sequencing: change must be organized before it is declared. That means sustained labor and professional strikes, coordination that links the bazaar to universities and provincial towns, protection of ethnic and sectarian minorities, and a credible transitional vision capable of reassuring citizens and peeling away elements of the state who fear chaos more than they resent repression.

Pragmatists on the fences

The final group — the majority of Iranians — lives day-to-day in a state of survival. For them, politics is filtered through the price of food, the availability of medicine and the erosion of purchasing power. As one recent assessment put it, Iran enters 2026 facing protests, inflation and continuing sanctions pressure — a mix that translates directly into household hardship. In such conditions, dignity becomes as much an economic demand as a civil one.

These pragmatists do join protests, often in localized and issue-specific waves, but they will not commit to movements that offer only slogans or martyrdom. They will ultimately align with whichever force can credibly promise stability, opportunity and basic fairness. Their fear of state collapse is genuine, shaped by regional examples as much as by domestic experience. This makes the battle over narrative and strategy decisive: the fence-sitters are the hinge of Iran’s political future, and any transition that loses their trust is unlikely to endure.

Grievances and the civic center

Iran’s discontent also carries ethnic and sectarian textures — Fars, Azeri, Kurd, Lors, Baloch, Turkmen, Arab; Shia and Sunni — shaped by uneven development, discrimination and heavy-handed security policies in peripheral regions. Yet the dominant thrust of the current unrest is not separatist; it is civic and national: a demand for accountable governance, equal citizenship and a state that serves society rather than polices it. The breadth of participation — from bazaars to campuses and provincial towns — underscores that this is a crisis of trust in institutions and a revolt against indignity, not identity, as outlined in reporting that maps the scope of protests across Iran.

Iran’s trajectory will be determined less by who speaks loudest on satellite television or social media than by who can articulate a credible path from protest to politics. The regime’s loyalists still control coercive instruments and patronage networks. The monarchists possess nostalgia and media reach. The pragmatists have numbers but seek reassurance. Only the nationalist intellectuals consistently connect the key dots: internal reform that avoids state collapse, democratization that can be sustained and a regional sensibility shaped by hard evidence rather than wishful shortcuts.

Iran will not be transformed by foreign air power, sanctions theater or romantic memories of a lost era. If transformation comes, it will emerge from sustained intellectual and civic work: building coalitions that cut across class and ethnicity, protecting pluralism amid crisis and designing a transition that prevents Iran from becoming the next arena in which other people’s geopolitical contests are fought. The immediate test is whether Iran’s most serious voices can keep the struggle grounded in strategy — and whether the wider public can be persuaded that disciplined, internally driven change is not only the safest path, but the only one that lasts. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.