Reza Pahlavi, the exiled prince on the middle of the ambiguities of the Iranian future | EUROtoday

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The title of Reza Pahlavi returns to flow into insistently as Iran goes via some of the important phases because the start of the Islamic Republic. The protests that reach from the suburbs to the massive cities, fueled by financial collapse, inflation and rising political repression, have reopened a long-pending query: who can embody a reputable various to the ayatollahs’ regime? In this void of management, the determine of the son of the final shah re-emerges as a robust and controversial image, able to catalyzing hopes, nostalgia and deep distrust.

Reza Pahlavi doesn’t lead the demonstrations, doesn’t coordinate them and isn’t the acknowledged chief of a structured motion. Yet his title resonates in slogans, circulates on social media, divides the diaspora and worries Tehran. It is an atypical political presence: bodily distant from the nation for nearly half a century, however surprisingly central to the talk on what may come “next”.

The story

Born in Tehran in 1960, Pahlavi was 17 years previous when he left Iran on the eve of the 1979 revolution. The collapse of the monarchy put an finish to a dynasty that had ruled the nation for over half a century within the title of pressured modernization, an alliance with the West and a extremely centralized political authority. The expertise of Shahism, even right this moment, stays some of the divisive points in Iranian collective reminiscence: for some synonymous with stability and growth, for others with repression, inequalities and geopolitical subordination.

After his father’s demise in 1980, Reza Pahlavi formally turned the top of the Royal House in exile, however for many years his position remained marginal, confined to the monarchical circles of the diaspora. Only lately, and extra markedly in the course of the present protests, has he chosen to reveal himself extra decisively, presenting himself not as an aspiring sovereign, however as a attainable transitional determine. The message he repeats is calibrated: not a monarchical restoration, however a path that results in a preferred referendum on the institutional way forward for Iran.

It is a place designed to seize a broad consensus, however which doesn’t resolve all ambiguities. On the one hand, Pahlavi presents himself because the guarantor of a democratic course of; then again, his very surname recollects a previous that many Iranians, particularly among the many youthful generations, know solely not directly and think about with suspicion. In the streets, his title typically appears to perform extra as a cry for rupture with the Islamic order than as an outlined political undertaking.