Not even the World Cup escaped the massive protests that have erupted in Iran since 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died. in the custody of the morality police in September.
Before their 6-2 loss to England, the Iranian team refused to sing the Islamic Republic’s national anthem, with some activists present waving protest banners and booing their own team for not quitting the tournament entirely in a display. of solidarity with the hundreds of young Iranians murdered in recent weeks.
Soccer is by far Iran’s favorite sport. So for Iranians to turn on their national team, especially one that had won the Asian qualification, speaks to the deep wound the protests have left etched into the country’s psyche.
As the movement grew and the protests spread from Tehran to the provinces, the protesters expanded their demands. His call to end police harassment of morality turned into chants of “death to the dictator”, a reference to the supreme leader, 83-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
His call to end police harassment of morality turned into chants of “death to the dictator,” a reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 83.
This crisis does not seem to threaten the survival of the regime. The protesters lack the means to overthrow the government and the leadership is unlikely to split. Fortunately for the regime, its external enemies are helping to keep its different factions together.
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Israel’s former and likely Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, both supporters of the protests, are probably the two most reviled figures in Iran. And the United States has a poor record of fostering regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, leaving behind failed or deeply destabilized states.
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But the Islamic Republic’s harsh crackdown on protesters has severed the government’s ties with generations of Iranians, not just the young. His parents’ generation had been largely loyal to the revolution; in their youth, middle-aged Iranians sought to reform the system from within rather than overthrow it.
Over the past two decades, reformists have tried, with limited success, to make the Islamic Republic more tolerant. Former President Mohammad Khatami, elected in 1997, pushed for “dialogue between civilizations” until he resigned in 2005. President Hassan Rouhani, who served from 2013 to 2021, promised moderate policies, as well as mending relations with the West and bringing End of economic sanctions.
Even former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elected as a hardliner in 2005, turned on his conservative benefactors and embraced his own brand of reformism. Since he left office in 2013, he has campaigned for greater individual liberties and the abolition of the moral police.
Take the hard line
In 2021, a hardliner frustrated by the cracks in his project engineered the election of a deeply conservative cleric, current President Ebrahim Raisi, whose task it would be to demonstrate what true Islamic revolutionaries can offer. A uniformly traditionalist government, the hardliners hoped, would generate economic prosperity and cement Iran’s position as a regional power, steering Iranians away from reform and rapprochement with the West.
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When prosperity failed to materialize, hardliners blamed poor economic performance on Western sanctions and neoliberal policies introduced by previous governments.
When prosperity failed to materialize, hardliners blamed poor economic performance on Western sanctions, neoliberal policies introduced by previous governments, and excessive reliance on globalized markets. Some even blamed the ineffective 2015 nuclear deal for the economic woes.
And furthermore, Raisi, who won the presidency with just 18 million votes (out of an electorate of 59 million), lacks the mandate and experience to deliver on his promises to cut a deal with the West, rein in inflation and stop the depreciation of the coin.
Conservatives weren’t ready when the protests broke out. Tensions between young women and the authorities over the forced wearing of the hijab have simmered for years, but conservatives dismissed them as a threat or a danger.
In fact, hardliners had been pushing for increased surveillance of women in public spaces since 2019, before Raisi’s election. Many thought it was time to reverse the lax enforcement of the 1983 hijab law, which criminalized women’s clothing deemed “un-Islamic.” That doing so was inconsistent with current times, and that the dress code had already sparked anti-hijab protests in Iran’s most prosperous urban neighborhoods, did not seem to raise alarm bells.
What the regime overlooked is that Iranian society has changed since 1983, when most women voluntarily observed the hijab law. Many women lived very different lives back then; they experienced 6 to 8 pregnancies on average, were not looking for work outside the home, and did not have as high an educational level.
What the regime overlooked is that Iranian society has changed since 1983, when most women voluntarily observed the hijab law.
The pro-poor policies of the early Islamic revolutionaries brought electricity, clean water, and health services to poor rural and urban areas, transforming the lives of many women. And today women in Iran marry in their mid to late twenties and have an average of two children. Thirty-eight percent of Iranian women in their 20s have at least some higher education, compared to 33% of men in their age cohort. For them, the mere idea that they could be arrested and dragged off to a re-education camp by the moral police is intolerable.
Added to this is a very complicated economic context. Raisi has promised to create one million jobs and one million new homes every year during his four-year term, he says he has focused on reaching his ambitious economic goals. But during his first year in office, the economy added just 374,000 jobs. We have no data on how many new houses were built during this time, but it seems safe to assume that it was much less than a million.
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A decade of economic failure has further stoked anger among the youth. Young people who graduate from college wait more than 2.5 years on average before landing their first job. In 2021, nearly half of college-educated women in their 20s and a quarter of their male peers were unemployed. Most Iranians in their twenties still live with their parents, financially unable to raise a family of their own.
In addition, Iran’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine makes reviving the nuclear deal almost impossible, as does the prospect of Iran rejoining the world economy anytime soon.
DJAVAD SALEHI-ISFAHANI
PROJECT SYNDICATE
(BLACKSBURG, VIRGINIA)
Professor of economics at Virginia Tech and associate for Middle Eastern issues at the Harvard Kennedy School.
‘A clear challenge to the regime’ Several analysts describe the current protest demonstrations as unprecedented due to their duration and because they bring together all social classes and ethnic groups. And because, furthermore, they are heading to openly request the end of the clerical regime. Burning banners of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have been seen, women walking unveiled and people challenging security forces.
Iran, meanwhile, accuses foreign powers of encouraging what it calls “riots.”
Although in an apparent attempt to calm things down, the Iranian prosecutor’s office claimed a few days ago that the morality police had been dismantled: an announcement met with skepticism by activists, as women continue to be forced to wear veils in public.
“It was pretty obvious from the start that the protests were not about reform or morality police, but about the regime as a whole,” says Shadi Sadr, founder of London-based Justice for Iran. “What is happening is a fundamental challenge to the regime,” she notes. “The atmosphere in Iran is revolutionary,” agrees Kasra Aarabi, director of the Iran program at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. For years there has been a growing trend of dissent against the regime, she says. “They can try to suppress the protesters, but they can’t suppress the revolutionary spirit,” she says. “The regime has never been so vulnerable in its 43-year history,” Iranian academic Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told US magazine Foreign Affairs. Another factor of uncertainty is Khamenei’s advanced age. The American Journal
New York Times
He assured in September that the 83-year-old supreme leader was “gravely” ill.
In response to the protests, the authorities mobilized what Amnesty International describes as “a finely tuned machine of repression”. At least 448 people, including 60 minors, have been killed by security forces, according to the Norway-based NGO Iran Human Rights. They also detained more than 14,000 people and six have been sentenced to death.
Sadr warns that it would be rash to predict that the regime is about to fall. “Dismantling a regime like the Islamic Republic is a very difficult task. There are still a few pieces missing for that to happen,” he says. But for Aarabi there is no doubt that it is “a revolution: and there is no going back.”
Stuart Williams / AFP / Paris
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