Introduction

In late December 2025, protests began across Iran, and by early January they had spread to twenty-seven of the country’s thirty-one provinces. The protests were in response to a crisis in cost of living caused by severe inflation/the collapse of the rial combined with stagnant wages, the consequences of an intricately linked combination of decades of sanctions, exacerbated after US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and internal corruption. As the protests grew in size and intensity, the economic demands developed into political demands. In the last few days, the internet has been shut off and many deaths have been reported. Trump has threatened military action repeatedly, and US military personnel have been evacuated from bases in Qatar, leading to speculation that a US attack on Iran may be approaching in the coming days. Israel has shown that it favors Reza Pahlavi as a candidate for regime change, while Trump’s comments show some hesitancy.

Yassamine Mather is a scholar at Oxford University as well as acting editor of Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory and chair of Hands Off the People of Iran (HOPI). She has published extensive articles on Iranian history and politics, and was a member of the Fedayeen (minority), a group which opposed both the Shah and Khomeini/the Islamic Republic. I had the opportunity to interview her on January 14, 2026, and the following is the transcript of our conversation.

Interview

Lydia: My first question is, what is the background for the current wave of protests? How do the economic factors behind the unrest that started in December–so, the currency collapse, inflation, and high prices–relate to the political demands that have emerged since then? And what is the significance of the Islamic Republic potentially losing its traditional base of support in the bazaar class due to the increasing cost of imported goods and raw materials?

Yassamine: The actual trigger, as far as we know, because maybe there were triggers we don’t know about–there are lots of conspiracy theories about Mossad and so on, I’m not going into those. In terms of the trigger we know of, however, the exchange rate between the dollar and the rial dramatically fell. It has been a process of, you know, it falls every week, but it just was yet another dramatic fall. So if you look at a year ago, I think it was something like 70,000 tomans for one dollar. On the day the protests started, it was 140,000. It’s a dramatic change in less than a year.

You have to understand that this is the direct result of sanctions. Most economies, capitalist economies, when the currency is falling, the government of that country, the central bank of that country, releases money reserves. So instead of the dollar getting more and more expensive, you have a situation where you control it. You might not be able to stop it, but at least you control it. But Iran can’t do that because its reserves are blocked.

But there is another problem. You could say it’s because of sanctions, which are a deliberate policy of weakening a state you are at war with, and the US and its allies are at war–a cold war. The goal is to weaken that country. But there is an additional factor, and that is the corruption surrounding the whole sanctions business. And here, the Iranian government has more than one rate of exchange. So if you are in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), if you are part of the state buying what they call “essential goods”–medicine and food items–the rate of the dollar is 28,000 tomans. It is ridiculously cheap compared to 140,000. Now, what happens is, government people, companies, private oligarchs, private capitalists, buy goods at the 28,000 toman rate and sell them at the 140,000 toman rate. And make huge profits.

Some of the richer bazaaris are benefiting from that, but your ordinary storeholder in the bazaar is not part of the establishment, not part of the inner circles that can benefit from that kind of money. You have corruption, you have a rentier economy. You asked a good question, what is the relationship between the economic demands and the politics. That’s where it’s connected. So people can see with their eyes how the economic situation is worsening for them–most people, not just the bazaar merchants who were actually doing better than some–but then some people are becoming super rich. The oligarchs, the private capitalists, the ones who are buying at 28,000, selling at 140,000. And there is corruption because the state manages that, the IRGC manages that. So you are in a situation where politics and the economy merge.

People are facing economic hardships, and they know who is causing those hardships. On the one hand, it’s the sanctions imposed by the US. Internally, they can’t do much about the US, but they can see what’s going on inside the country and that’s why most of the slogans were about corruption. But then, obviously corruption at this level and this depth can only exist if you’ve got dictatorship. The dictatorship is part of maintaining this type of rentier economy, and it always turns into shouting against the Islamic Republic, or at least against the Revolutionary Guards who are part of this, the senior leadership, and Ayatollah Khamenei.

Losing the bazaar base is important for the regime, but I think what followed was far worse. Because remember they didn’t lose the rich bazaaris, they lost the lower sections of the bazaar. But still, that is the traditional Shia mosque-going section of the lower middle classes, so losing that is not a good thing. But are they the most important part of Iranian society? No. So that wasn’t the problem, the problem was other people joining this.

There are different stories, and you have to be careful what you say because I don’t know, but clearly once the demonstrations got bigger, both Mossad and whoever else had people inside Iran trying to make the protests more violent than the ordinary people wanted to, I think. For example, setting fire to mosques. Yes, some young Iranians would be angry enough to do this, I’m not denying that. But I don’t think the protests started with this. The protests started against the economic situation, became very political, there were clearly slogans against Khamenei, against dictatorship, and the original slogans, definitely also against the Shah. Because people wanted to separate their anger from support for the Shah. And then in the midst of this, there were also, yes, agents provocateurs. But I think the government’s attempt to say it was only them is a lie because obviously you can’t have such a large number of people demonstrating if it was just the provocateurs.

Lydia: Yeah, it definitely seems like on the one hand there’s no doubt that it is a genuine movement that is spurred by people’s grievances with the government, while at the same time there’s no way the governments of the US and Israel wouldn't try to take what opportunity they have.

I’ve seen some commentators talk about how there have been many points at which it was thought there might be a situation where the Islamic Republic would collapse, and people thought each situation was different for different reasons. But people are saying that this time around there are reasons to believe that it really could be a different situation. Of course, a lot of it depends on whether military action is taken by the Trump administration. I saw that you pointed out in a previous interview how Trump has threatened “serious consequences” if Iran executes protestors, and it seems that already many have been shot. So I wonder if there are different factions in the Trump administration that are arguing over this as we speak.

How do you think the current protests compare to the protests in 2009, 2019, 2022-2023, both in terms of the content and the likely outcome, including the possibility of US military intervention?

Yassamine: In 2009 the protests were big, probably as big as what we are seeing now. The difference is that the leadership was part of the establishment. I mean [Mir-Hossein Mousavi] wanted reform, but he never wanted, for example, the overthrow of Ayatollah Khamenei. So there was a difference there. I think that stopped the demonstrations from going further. Some of the repression was just as bad from what I can gather, but it didn’t go as far because of its leadership.

Numerically the start of these protests were smaller than 2023, the spread was wider, so you had more provinces but fewer people in each protest. But then it does look like it became quite a big protest. So numerically, this is probably now what happened on Friday. Saturday, there were larger protests. And some of it was radical. I don’t think it was just the Mossad that were radical. Ordinary people were angry and showed their anger.

The problem remains that the security services, the Revolutionary Guards, are united. We are not seeing divisions within the Revolutionary Guards, or at least I can’t see it. We are not seeing defections from the Revolutionary Guards. Khamenei is very keen not to use the army because of 1979. First of all, the army is probably less reliable, but then there are echoes of 1979 in that. So he’s trying not to use the army. The Revolutionary Guards have heavy weapons, so he doesn’t need to use the army. The separation is deliberate as far as I can see.

In terms of Trump and military operations, there are a few things, and I’m speculating here because I don’t know what they’re thinking. As much as Netanyahu wants to bring back a specific regime change–Pahlavi–Trump doesn’t seem interested in that. Trump has refused to meet him. I think people around Trump don’t think Pahlavi is capable of uniting the opposition and they’re right. He’s probably a more divisive than uniting force.

When Trump went for the Venezuelan kidnapping event, I don’t know if you remember, but in one of the first interviews he said, “And we didn’t botch it up like they did under Carter when they went to release the hostages in Iran.” This was quite significant because it had nothing to do with Iran. My guess is that people around him are telling him, look, there are risks. If you tried to kidnap Khamenei, there are risks, because there are people who will give their lives to make sure he’s not kidnapped, for example. So he has that problem.

I don’t think it’s what the supporters of the Islamic Republic are saying, that Iran is so militarily strong, the missiles are so great, the nuclear power is so great, that Trump is scared of Iran. No. We have a superpower and this superpower is extremely powerful militarily, and it can annihilate Iran in a matter of days, I assume. And the threat that Iran will close the strait of Hormuz, these are all possibilities, but I don’t think Trump is sitting there worrying about that. He’s more likely planning a limited action, be it electronic hacking or taking down a number of senior officials, and he wants to make sure it happens. He doesn’t want the risk of failure. And that is, I assume, a part of his calculation.

On the other hand, he has made many threats and then he hasn’t done anything about it. I think early on he said, “If a protester is killed, we will attack.” Then he said, “If there’s more killing, I will attack.” On Saturday night, BBC Persia was saying the US was going to attack that night. But it was wrong, they weren’t going to attack that night. And now he said this yesterday.

There are reports today that the US is moving some of its military from Qatar. If that’s true, maybe they are planning something for tonight. So I’m not saying he won’t do it, but I think what he’s doing is negotiating with some people as well. So the threats are like ultimatums: “if you don’t listen to what I say, I’ll definitely go for the bombing.” We should take these with a grain of salt, unlike the bourgeois press. We shouldn’t take everything they say at face value; there are a lot of dubious statements. He clearly was negotiating, he’s not negotiating anymore. But in the British press, there are reports that in addition to negotiating with the Islamic Republic, the Trump administration is planning some kind of coup within the regime. And that they are going to specific people with the idea of maybe a military coup. If that is the case, he’s not going to attack, because those people will lose out.

Lydia: I think maybe a lot of the sense that something might happen comes from how a lot of people thought he would not really take action in Venezuela, and then he did, and I guess it just seems unpredictable what might happen. Then there are these reports–some of these reports, it’s hard to trust them, because you don’t know where they got the information from. Like the claim that Khamenei is planning to go to Moscow. I wasn’t sure what the source was for that, or where some of these claims are coming from.

Yassamine: The Moscow claim–I read it as well–apparently it originates from an Israeli reporter. She said it first in Tel Aviv. And then it kind of gained momentum.

Luckily you don’t follow Iranian social media, but there you actually see the plane he’s supposed to go on. Which you would have thought, if he was planning that, they wouldn’t show the plane, would they? There’s a lot of that kind of rumor.

My own guess, because I know the history of Khamenei–I don’t know what he’s become, because he’s become worse as a dictator, as a ruler. But knowing who he is and who he was, he would rather die than go to Moscow. And I think people who are saying he will go, and members of his family will go with him, just don’t know him that well. This is a man who is 86, he doesn’t have long to live, he’s going to die a hero. And he would think that if he dies a hero, his followers will follow his way, he’ll be a Shia martyr, and non-Shia Muslims will also follow him.

There is a problem in all of this in that obviously that makes the negotiations very difficult because this is not someone who is going to give up easily, he’s not going to negotiate in the way Trump wants him to negotiate. But it also means that if it’s true that Trump is trying to find allies within the Islamic Republic, they will all know that this man will not go. So the question is, can people convince him that in order for the Islamic Republic to survive in its most difficult hour–I think this is more difficult than anything we’ve seen since 1979–that he must accept some demands.

Apparently during the Twelve-Day War, Khamenei wrote a list of people who could replace him should he be killed, because they expected that Mossad would kill him. And in fact Mossad claimed that they could assassinate him. So he had prepared a list of possible successors. It could be that people around him are saying it’s either the end of the Islamic Republic, or you going public with your list of successors and accepting a moderate successor. My understanding is that this list, contrary to what some Iranians are saying, did not contain either his son or some of the hardliners. The list included quite a few reformists. So maybe that’s where he’s going, but again, we don’t know because we don’t know the workings within the Islamic Republic.

Lydia: It seems like there is this portrayal of people united around Pahlavi, and it’s hard to tell how much of that comes from his apparent popularity among the diaspora. But to what extent is he popular as an opposition figure in Iran?

Yassamine: You’re right about the diaspora, because among at least the wealthy Iranians who are in exile–some of them came in ‘79, some came a bit later– he’s popular, and he spends money, and Israel spends money to encourage his supporters. In London, every time we go to Palestine demonstrations there is a very small counter-demonstration of Zionists and Iran’s royalists are with them, a group of maybe forty to fifty people, and then there are tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of pro-Palestine demonstrators.

Inside Iran, I have serious doubts. There are a number of reasons. I can’t prove it, but there are a number of reasons.

The first week, when the internet was active, when people could send social media messages, this TV station that is basically a Mossad TV station, called Iran International, and their Youtube channel, which is again paid for by Mossad–and they don’t even deny it, they have experts from Mossad speaking there. It’s Israel TV, it’s as obvious as that. But it broadcasts 24/7 to Iran. This TV channel was showing videos where people were shouting “Javid Shah!” (“Long live the Shah!”). Ordinary people were then going to social media posting their versions, saying, “Look, we recorded this. We were there. And the slogan was actually the opposite. It was ‘No to the Shah, no to the leader [Khamenei/the dictatorship].’” Because a lot of Iranians still equate the Shah, despite the modernization that they want in some way, with dictatorship. He was a dictator. The number of people who are still suffering because of the torture they received under his security forces is unbelievable. He was a different kind of dictator. So I don’t believe that he’s popular at all.

Since the internet has closed, these TV channels and people with Starlink are the only people that can show videos, and I think the videos we’re seeing, some of which the British press, the Norwegian press–I’ve been speaking to some of these media people–in India, all of these videos are fake. They’re literally fake videos in that a large protest is taking place and someone has put audio files over the video. Some of the videos, you can look on Twitter and see that they are fake. For example, on Sunday there were a lot of pictures showing riots in Tehran and then people were starting to note that the cars shown in the video do not exist in Iran. There were videos of Los Angeles riots of 2020 and people had put Iran on it. The other one was a huge crowd on snowy ground. In Iran, two weeks ago there was snow. In the last week there was no snow. Apparently this is Minneapolis and the demonstration in Minneapolis is shown as if it’s Tehran. The fake news is so widespread that it’s not the odd fake video. There’s another where a woman is shouting in favor of Pahlavi and claiming to be in Tehran. On Twitter people have found that she actually lives in Canada.

So yes, there are some people who like his grandfather, Reza Shah. This is the young generation that think of him as a secular ruler, a modernizer, and so on. What they haven’t been told by the media that feeds them nostalgia about the Pahlavi era is that he had fascist sympathies. One of the reasons the Allies removed him from power was because he was helping Hitler. So I know some Iranians have become pro-Hitler or pro-Netanyahu and therefore pro-extreme right, not necessarily Hitler in person. But this is still not a majority view in Iran.

Women are well aware that he was a misogynist. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement has really been very good at exposing Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, this current Pahlavi’s immediate father, not grandfather. There are ample examples of what he has said about women being less intelligent, not able to produce even a good cook, and so on, and his misogyny in terms of the memoirs of former close aides who have written about his womanizing. Some people have actually said that had he lived in the current period he might have faced the kind of backlash that Epstein or Prince Andrew is facing.

Yes, there are women in the diaspora, or women paid by Mossad, but even right-wing women in the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement separated themselves from the whole Pahlavi agenda because they didn’t want to be associated with misogyny and the kind of crude womanizing for which he was famous.

Lydia: I don’t have any more specific questions, but do you have any more thoughts that you want to share?

Yassamine: We have to realize that there are various forces trying to become the opposition, the uniting force. Some of them call themselves the forces that will facilitate transition. The first group I’m talking about were close to Pahlavi but he fell out with them. I don’t know what he does, but people keep leaving his immediate campaigns. The first group of people who left him includes the first Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, one of the Kurdish organizations, and some people who are associated with the paper Kayhan, one of Iran’s major newspapers which, when the Shah left, established itself in London with money from royalists. It stopped printing a while back because it wasn’t selling, but it has quite a lot of writers associated with it, some of whom joined Mossad TV, while some remained as Kayhan. They are in this alliance of “forces that will facilitate transition” because they fell out with Reza Pahlavi. This group is clearly pro-foreign intervention and my guess is that among the many options Trump is looking at, they are one. But I don’t see them as serious contenders.

Then there is another set with a similar agenda of being a transitional government. It’s another bourgeois liberal alternative. So we have Narges Mohammadi–the year before last she won the Nobel Peace Prize. The filmmaker Panahi, we have a number of those kinds of people. They are slightly better in that they haven’t been tarnished by the image of Pahlavi, but I read their leaflet and there is nothing about foreign intervention, there is nothing about genocide in Gaza, there’s nothing that even in terms of liberal bourgeois terminology will gain them support. It’s not serious.

The Left is very weak. If you look around, the unions have put out some very good leaflets–supporting the protests, they’re not saying that everyone is a Mossad agent, unlike some on the British or US Left. But they’re very clear against genocide done by Israel, they name Israel as a genocidal country, they’re very much against foreign intervention of any kind. They’re against regime change from above, and they say we have to improve the slogans to include unpaid wages, workers’ wages, workers’ rights to organize and so on. By all accounts they are better than anything else you can see. These are not just small groups or individual leaflets. We have the Vahed bus workers. We have Reza Shahabi, one of the leaders, making additional personal statements clarifying his opposition to foreign intervention. But we also have emerging united organizations of workers.

One of the most important is among the oil workers. The oil industry has been privatized, so we can’t see a repetition of 1979 where we might see a united oil workers strike, because there are hundreds of contract companies. But these efforts to unite contract workers, unite workers who are in these various privatized firms, is very significant. Some of it started with the oil workers who have been on strike. The press and media abroad never mentioned their strike, but as soon as the bazaar got busy they were all over the news. But the oil workers’ strikes are active now. They are trying to organize unity among various divided sections of the working class. And we have the Haft Tappeh sugar cane workers who have been in the news for years, who have opposed privatization, fought against conglomerates, oligarchs, and so on. So I think their statements and their activities are what we should follow as opposed to Reza Pahlavi or these bourgeois alternatives that are competing with each other for importance in this battle.