Why I feel the Islamic Republic can’t survive this rebellion | EUROtoday

This article first appeared on our companion website, Independent Persian

“Knife-wielding thugs”, “weeds that must be uprooted, cut down and thrown away”, these have been a number of the phrases Ali Khamenei used on 10 June 1992. One may suppose he was referring to organised felony gangs. He was not. He was describing the folks of Mashhad, who had taken to the streets after safety forces killed a high-school scholar within the metropolis’s Kuy-e Tollab neighbourhood.

Thirty-four years later, in Mashhad – the birthplace of the supreme chief – protesters have as soon as once more stuffed the streets, capturing the world’s consideration. From the White House, the US president is now talking of town slipping into the arms of well-liked forces. The ideological and spiritual coronary heart of the Islamic Republic, the symbolic metropolis certain to Khamenei’s personal life story, has change into the scene of the most important rebellion ever directed towards “the very foundation of the Islamic Republic”.

Over greater than three many years of rule, Khamenei has confronted repeated waves of unrest, protests, and social and political actions: the Mashhad riots of 1992, the Islamshahr and Shiraz protests that adopted, the coed motion of 1999, the Green Movement of 2009, the December 2017-2018 protests, the November 2019 rebellion and eventually the Mahsa motion of 2022.

Each time, the regime survived, at the price of mass repression, killings and immense political and financial harm. That historical past could have led Khamenei and the small circle round him to consider that this newest wave of protests will also be crushed utilizing the identical outdated strategies: violent suppression, attrition, chopping communications and dividing the opposition.

But what’s unfolding immediately is essentially and strategically totally different.

The Islamic Republic is not going through simply one other wave of social unrest. It is going through the collapse of its capability to manipulate. It has crossed the road from a crisis-ridden state to a bankrupt one – what political science calls a “failed state”: a authorities not in a position to present fundamental providers, implement efficient authority, or reproduce legitimacy and loyalty.

It occurred virtually in a single day

The turning level got here within the early hours of 12 June 2025, when Israel launched large strikes towards Islamic Republic’s army and safety infrastructure, plunging the regime into an unprecedented state of emergency. That emergency didn’t finish when the 12-day warfare ended. The Islamic Republic by no means returned to “normal” as a result of its safety and materials foundations had been eroded on the identical time.

When UN snapback sanctions have been triggered in October 2025 and the United States intensified its strain on Iran’s oil-smuggling networks, the regime’s monetary lifelines have been reduce. The rentier state, which had survived by distributing money and privileges to its loyal networks, immediately confronted a crippling useful resource scarcity. This was not only a finances drawback. It grew to become an incapacity to offer the fundamentals: meals, drugs, electrical energy, water, gasoline and gas.

The regime discovered itself in a structural deadlock. To stop social explosion, it needed to provide the inhabitants with the minimal residing requirements. But to outlive politically, it additionally needed to preserve feeding the safety forces, militias and patronage networks that kind the spine of its rule and any harm to their pursuits would speed up its inner collapse. But the regime not has the cash to maintain each. The result’s the paralysis of the Islamic Republic’s conventional mode of governance.

From rentier state to bankrupt state

Even through the bloodiest moments of the November 2019 rebellion and the Mahsa motion, the Islamic Republic nonetheless had a key benefit: monetary and diplomatic room to manoeuvre. Under the Biden administration and through nuclear talks, the Islamic Republic was promoting round 1.2 million barrels of oil a day. Despite sanctions, it had comparatively easy accessibility to laborious foreign money. There was no looming direct warfare, no nationwide energy, water and gasoline disaster, and most significantly, it was in a position to purchase the relative loyalty of its safety forces and patronage networks.

Today, none of that continues to be. The Islamic Republic in 2026 is a state with no cash, no diplomatic horizon and no functioning regional community. All that’s left is a drained, costly, eroding suppression machine that lacks each legitimacy and sustainable funding.

For three many years, one of many regime’s pillars was its regional attain: Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and networks in Syria. This community of proxies have been instruments of deterrence towards Israel and the United States, and likewise a supply of satisfaction and unity for the regime’s ideological base.

That structure has now largely collapsed. Hassan Nasrallah and his successor are useless. Hezbollah is underneath intense strain to disarm. Militias linked to the Quds Force in Iraq are being contained. The Islamic Republic’s missile stockpiles and air defence techniques have been badly broken. For the primary time, the Islamic Republic is weak each at house and overseas.

It has misplaced certainly one of its most important survival instruments: the power to threaten, discount and intimidate from a place of power.

The chief in hiding, cracks on the high of the facility construction

Alongside the collapse of fabric and exterior sources, the very high of the facility construction has begun to crack. Khamenei, as soon as the central pillar of the regime, is now residing in hiding, whereas key Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders have been killed or sidelined. The aura of invulnerability across the supreme chief has been shattered. In techniques like this, the mere notion that the chief is weak is itself a driver of collapse.

These protests will not be nearly poverty or discrimination. They are constructed round a transparent demand: the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. The Iranian society has concluded that this technique can’t be reformed, and that its survival means the destruction of the nation’s future.

People will not be solely fleeing repression and hardship, they’re fleeing hopelessness. They see a state that can’t preserve the lights on, can’t present drugs or meals, whose leaders are hiding underground, and whose regional energy has crumbled. What stays will not be a robust authorities, however a bankrupt one.

The Islamic Republic has shifted from a rentier state with minimal governing capability right into a bankrupt system. Even if the regime manages to delay the end result by means of bloodshed, the equation has not modified: the general public desires regime change, the cash is gone, and exterior energy has collapsed.

One truth is definite: the endgame has begun.

Reviewed by Celine Assaf