The New 12 months demonstrations in Iran got here on the finish of a 12 months marked by conflict, financial pressure, and political uncertainty.
In 2025, Israel launched a 12-day attack on Iran, assassinating senior navy leaders and focusing on navy and financial infrastructure. The assault was adopted by US strikes on Iranian nuclear amenities in Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz.
Because the 12 months closed, protests erupted within the capital, Tehran, and in cities throughout central and southwestern Iran, starting within the closing week of 2025 and persevering with into the primary days of 2026.
These protests weren’t unprecedented. Iranian society has witnessed thousands of demonstrations because the mid-Nineties, various in scale and ranges of participation. Over time, the drivers of those demonstrations have differed, starting from restrictions on social and political freedoms to the deterioration of financial circumstances.
In Iran, recurring protests are formed by the interplay between home politics, governance, overseas coverage, and the affect of sanctions, which collectively affect each the emergence of dissent and the state’s response to it, notably amid sustained sanctions and ongoing tensions with Israel and america.
The protests that closed the 12 months adopted a strike by retailers and bazaar house owners over a pointy decline in buying energy. This accelerated decline was pushed by rising inflation, mirrored within the falling worth of the Iranian rial, which misplaced the equal of about 50 p.c of its worth, and by a rise in unemployment to 7.5 p.c.
This was not the primary time financial grievances had sparked unrest. In 2008, following a rise within the charge of value-added tax, the bazaar erupted in protest, forcing the federal government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to retreat from implementing the measure.
Extra restricted demonstrations adopted in 2010, after the Ahmadinejad authorities tried to impose a legislation elevating the earnings tax charge to 70 p.c, earlier than retreating once more beneath fashionable strain.
Throughout Iran’s protest actions over totally different durations, financial issues have constantly featured alongside calls for for higher social freedom, together with opposition to obligatory hijab legal guidelines. These points prompted widespread demonstrations in 2022, after the killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini whereas in custody over the hijab legislation, and the authorities’ makes an attempt accountable her for what occurred, which fuelled public anger.
However, no elementary reforms have been undertaken by successive governments. President Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005) proposed an alternate financial technique centered on lowering reliance on oil revenues and growing non-oil sectors to mitigate the affect of sanctions, which frequently goal Iran’s oil business. These measures didn’t succeed, nonetheless, because the nuclear disaster escalated after the publication of the primary photos of the Natanz facility in August 2002, rising financial strain from overseas.
From 2005 to 2013, Ahmadinejad pursued a populist strategy, centred on redistributing oil revenues by means of the so-called oil-to-cash programme. This technique failed, encountering resistance from highly effective home financial pursuits and the tightening sanctions regime imposed by the United Nations Safety Council, beneath resolutions 1696, 1737, 1747, 1803, and 1929. These measures restricted commerce, froze monetary belongings, and curtailed entry to worldwide finance, constructing on years of unilateral US sanctions courting again to 1980.
Unhealthy governance, or sanctions?
As demonstrations have expanded in scope over time, an everlasting query has resurfaced: To what extent do sanctions clarify Iran’s financial disaster, and the place does governance bear accountability?
Iran’s financial system has suffered from longstanding structural issues that haven’t been addressed since 1980, as priorities linked to revolutionary ideology and its related prices have taken priority over constructing a resilient state financial system. Financial and monetary laws didn’t hold tempo with world developments. Because of this, Iran grew to become more and more remoted from worldwide markets, compounding inner crises and amplifying the affect of sanctions throughout almost all sectors.
This raises a persistent query for Iran’s political and financial elite: Why have successive governments didn’t advance financial insurance policies and programmes able to countering the results of sanctions?
On this context, Iran’s financial partnerships with China, most notably the 25-year strategic cooperation settlement – valued at $400bn and overlaying vitality, telecommunications, transport, and infrastructure – haven’t delivered financial stability. Nor has the strategic partnership with Russia, signed in early 2025 and meant to strengthen cooperation over twenty years, improved Iran’s financial scenario.
Collectively, these partnerships have didn’t mitigate the cruel penalties of sanctions imposed by the US and the European Union.
Iranian public opinion, as mirrored in protest slogans, has lengthy linked overseas coverage, notably Iran’s involvement within the Center East to the depletion of nationwide earnings. Iran’s help for proxies and armed teams — together with in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, in addition to Palestine — has lengthy been a part of its regional technique, drawing on funding, coaching, and logistical help from Tehran. As dwelling circumstances deteriorated, the slogan “No Gaza or Lebanon, let my life be a scapegoat for Iran” was heard repeatedly, rising as a defining characteristic of demonstrations on the finish of 2024.
Since early 2025, nonetheless, this linkage has turn out to be much less convincing as an evidence for Iran’s financial disaster. Iranian affect has declined considerably in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and Yemen, weakening the argument that regional engagements are the first drain on state assets. This shift has gone to this point that some Iranian navy officers have even demanded that Syria repay round $50bn in debt to Iran — a declare rejected by members of Syria’s new interim authorities as they put together a compensation invoice towards Tehran for the prices of its help for the regime in the course of the civil conflict moderately than settle for reimbursement.
For the primary time, Supreme Chief Ali Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian have publicly acknowledged that accountability for Iran’s financial scenario can’t be positioned solely on sanctions. This admission underscored the persevering with centrality of governance failures and clarified how the management interprets the protests that adopted the Israeli and US assaults in the summertime of 2025.
Diverging narratives and the dangers forward
Iran’s management now advances two competing narratives to elucidate the demonstrations. The primary, articulated by the supreme chief and the president, centres on failures in financial governance and recognises that sanctions alone can not account for the depth of the disaster. The second, promoted by the safety institution, continues to stress the function of exterior actors in inciting unrest and focusing on the regime.
This divergence creates confusion inside state establishments, because the safety narrative implicitly frames the demonstrations as an existential risk. In doing so, it deepens social tensions and widens the hole between the regime and society.
Traditionally, issues over regime survival have strengthened the place of the safety institution in responding to protests. Immediately, nonetheless, a modified inner and regional context locations strain on each political and safety establishments to reply otherwise, if the survival of the political system is to be ensured.
On the similar time, the arrogance and navy functionality felt by Israel, mixed with what Iranian leaders understand as limitless US help, has enabled Israeli decision-makers to noticeably ponder a brand new conflict on Iran. Israel has successfully begun a second navy operation by means of a transparent narrative that it’ll not enable Iran to counterpoint uranium in any respect, and that the Iranian nuclear program needs to be dismantled simply because the Libyan nuclear program was dismantled in 2003. Such a battle would goal to render the regime fragile, politically, economically, and in safety phrases.
This prospect has intensified Iran’s inner confrontation with its society, elevating the likelihood {that a} extended state of battle might finally result in regime change, even when solely over time, with the declared goal of neutralising what Israel regards because the “Iranian risk” as soon as and for all.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
