Pressure Without Resolution: Reading Iran’s Latest Wave of Protest

I was going to post today about China and what is coming in 2026 - but thought the fast-developing situation in Iran should probably come first.

So Xi and the next twelve months next.

I wrote this before this morning’s extraordinary events in Venezuela; so I’ll have to come back to those too.

Today, it’s Iran and some assessments of what is going on, why and what might come next.

For nearly a week, protests have been flaring across Iran in a pattern that is both familiar and newly unsettling because it closely echoes the rhythm of unrest seen repeatedly over the past five years.

As in the recent past, shows of dissent began as a result of a familiar set of interlocking factors: anger at the collapsing rial; complaints with prices that change by the hour; rage that wages that no longer stretch to rent or food.

As Iran watchers know, shopkeepers and traders are usually the first to react, shutting their businesses not as an ideological gesture but as an acknowledgement that normal commerce had become impossible.

Yet, as has happened time and again, once people gathered in public to air grievances, the language of dissent shifted: economic slogans bled rapidly into political rejection, with chants and graffiti that spoke not just of hardship, but of responsibility and power.

The trajectory in recent days reflects waves that have risen in recent years.

In 2019, demonstrations initially sparked by fuel price rises spread with astonishing speed into a nationwide revolt against corruption and elite privilege.

In 2021 and again in the early summer 2022, protests over water shortages and food subsidies did much the same: complaints about mismanagement and scarcity quickly turned into open criticism of the political system that had produced those conditions, and of those who have benefited while most have suffered.

The most dramatic example came in September 2022, after the death of Mahsa Amini in custody.

That movement, often remembered for its moral and cultural demands under the slogan ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ was also deeply rooted in social and economic frustration: young people who poured into the streets were protesting not only about police brutality, about the treatment of women in Iran, about dress codes or about elite capture of the state, but about the sense of a future doomed by inflation, unemployment and international isolation.

The protests over recent days have received widespread international coverage.