Iran protests seem different. They may lead to real change. | Opinion

Iran’s latest protest wave did not begin as a grand ideological crusade. It began the way breakdowns often do, with daily life becoming unlivable.

When a currency collapses, prices spiral, wages no longer cover basic needs and public services fail, politics stops being a debate over competing visions and becomes a referendum on endurance.

That is the core reality emerging from Iran today. People are not protesting because they suddenly discovered activism. They are protesting because the habits of coping, tightening their belts, leaning on family and waiting for conditions to improve have finally stopped working.

Exhaustion is not a mood. It is a political force.

This is why the protests are best understood as justified, even in the narrowest sense of the word. A state can reasonably demand obedience when it provides security and a minimum level of stability. When it cannot – or will not – protect the basic conditions of life, it forfeits the moral claim that dissent is illegitimate or harmful.

The regime’s response has been to deny that legitimacy outright. The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has not addressed citizens with grievances.

He has spoken of “vandals” and “harmful people,” framing protesters as tools of foreign powers. This is not simply rhetoric. It is a governing logic.

If protesters are defined as enemies, repression becomes defense, and lethal force can be justified as saving the nation.

The Iranian government isn't helping its case

Yet the regime’s own behavior undermines its narrative.

A government confident in its legitimacy does not need to plunge a country into an information blackout. It does not cut international calls, throttle domestic networks, degrade satellite internet and then selectively restore access through a “white list” for trusted institutions while ordinary citizens remain cut off.

That is the logic of a leadership confronting a crisis it cannot manage through normal politics. The blackout is not a technical detail. It is an admission: an effort to slow coordination, prevent documentation and create a fog in which violence becomes easier and accountability harder.

None of this means foreign actors are absent. Israel, by capability and longstanding interest, is always a relevant variable in Iranian affairs through intelligence activity, cyber operations and strategic signaling.

How did the Iran protests start?

However, it is essential to separate two questions that the Iranian leadership deliberately blurs: Did foreign actors exploit events? Or did they create them?

The first is plausible. The second is not convincing. You do not need foreign engineers to manufacture unrest when the structural conditions already exist: an economy distorted by monopoly and patronage, sanctions layered onto corruption and mismanagement, and a legitimacy base that has steadily narrowed.

In such environments, outside actors do what they always do. They look for openings, amplify what suits their interests and attempt to shape outcomes. But opportunism is not authorship. The opportunity was created at home, through years of governance choices and a persistent refusal to adapt.

That refusal helps explain why calls for political change are now rising both inside Iran and abroad. Once protest becomes habitual, once going to the street becomes the only language a society feels it has, demands escalate.

Economic pain turns into political indictment. Slogans stop asking for relief and begin challenging the structure itself.

Even analysts cautious about labeling this moment a “revolution” recognize the same pattern: deepening legitimacy erosion, widening coalitions, and a confrontation that repression can delay but not resolve.

Protesters represent a large chunk of society

What is new and politically significant is the breadth of the coalition. Students, workers, an embittered middle class and parts of the bazaar are all visible in the protests.

That does not guarantee success, but it signals that the crisis has reached constituencies that historically avoid open rupture until the ground is already shifting. In a system where opportunity has increasingly depended on loyalty and proximity to power, that matters.

It suggests the regime’s model is failing not only morally, but also functionally.

The Iranian population overseas has played a limited but important role in this moment, by organizing protests in key cities around the world, meeting with Western politicians, and keeping the story in the limelight in spite of the government's internet blackout.

That contribution matters. At the same time, from my observation, the Iranian community overseas remains divided and structurally disconnected from the decentralized, high-risk movement inside Iran on issues such as whether Reza Pahlavi, the crown prince of Iran who lives in exile, should take the lead in pushing for reforms.

Visibility abroad does not automatically translate into coordination on the ground.

This gap has consequences. Fragmentation allows the regime to argue to the outside world that there is no credible alternative.

It also allows the regime to warn society that any change risks chaos. This is why the question increasingly confronting Iranians is not simply whether the system must go, but how?

What comes next for Iran?

Many Iranians can hold two beliefs at once: that the current order is exhausted, and that the aftermath of its collapse is frightening.

This fear is not irrational. It is shaped by recent regional history. It is also why foreign “help,” especially military intervention, is a dangerous fixation.

External powers pursue interests, not liberation, and interventions often turn uprisings into proxy conflicts or fractured states. Even the perception of foreign sponsorship can splinter internal coalitions and hand the regime its most effective accusation ‒ that dissent equals treason.

A clear-eyed reading of this moment leads to three conclusions:

• First, the protests are justified because exhaustion has become a political fact, not a passing emotion.
• Second, foreign actors may exploit the crisis, but they did not create it; the drivers are domestic and structural.
• Third, calls for political change are rising inside and outside Iran, but the central weakness remains the absence of a convincing, inclusive vision of what comes next.

If this confrontation continues, the decisive factor will not be who issues the strongest statement abroad or which foreign capital signals sympathy. It will be whether the movement inside Iran can persist under repression and blackout, and whether fractures emerge within the ruling system that make continued violence unsustainable.

Alongside that, a determining factor will be whether those seeking change can shift from competing for attention to building credibility: a shared vision, minimal unity and a transition story capable of defeating the regime’s two most powerful tools – fear and darkness.

Alex Vatanka is an Iranian-born senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. His most recent book is "The Battle of the Ayatollahs in Iran: The United States, Foreign Policy and Political Rivalry since 1979."