WIREDGOV

Protests in Iran add to an uncertainty over the fate of the Iranian regime, that is felt within the country and the region.

Since protests erupted on 28 December 2025, Iran’s deepening cost-of-living crisis and renewed US and Israeli rhetoric about ’options on the table‘, have pushed the Islamic Republic back to the top of the international agenda. It is tempting to cast the unrest as an endgame. While the system has historically absorbed shocks through coercion, calibrated concessions and narrative control, this cycle appears qualitatively different. Even if the regime has successfully contained the protests for now, it is confronting a more structural, potentially existential, stress test of state capacity, elite cohesion and deterrence.

The initial trigger for the protests was economic: renewed volatility in the Rial and year-end inflation running above 50% on some measures further eroded household purchasing power, this already thin after the years of sanctions and policy mismanagement that followed the 2018 nuclear deal withdrawal by the US. Within days, the protests took a turn toward anti-government, pro-opposition chants. The Iranian regime quickly moved to suppress the unrest through lethal force, mass arrests and executions, with some estimating that more than 2,500 people had been killed – though the true toll remains contested amid the regime-imposed, ongoing internet blackout, with one report of 16,500 feared dead.

The regime’s resort to brutality underscores how far its claims to legitimacy have eroded across broad segments of society, and how sharply the gap has widened between the governing elite and the governed. Legitimacy does not need to be universal to sustain an autocracy, but it does need to be sufficient to reduce the everyday costs of rule. The frequency of spontaneous protests over water shortages and electricity, and the scale and intensity of coercion deployed since late December suggests that this reservoir is thinning, forcing the state to rely more heavily on fear and fatigue than consent.

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