Mass protests across Iran have weakened the regime, although it is unlikely to fall unless two conditions are met.
First, the security forces must split or defect. So far, the military remains loyal. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), 125,000 strong, is part of the status quo. It is ideological, an integral part of the regime and a major economic power.
The paramilitary Basij youth corps, with 90,000 volunteers and hundreds of thousands of reservists, is an arm of the guards. The Basij identifies with regime hardliners and has been charged with maintaining security and morality.
Second, there must be a clear, credible successor to the regime. The internal opposition consists of monarchists, secularists and republicans, as well as Kurdish and Baluch minoritarians. They mobilise locally, have diverging programmes and no unified command.
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The government has crushed all attempts at political organisation, shuttered non-governmental agencies, students’ groups and unions and arrested key figures. As a result, protests have either been called by various parties or have been a response to detentions and shootings during demonstrations.
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Divisions are replicated in the diaspora where opposition factions have drummed up external support for their cause.
During 1978-79, some army units joined the uprising while others remained loyal. They fought a decisive battle at Tehran’s airport on February 10th and the regime fell a day later.
There was also a well-organised opposition movement led by France-based Ayatollah Khomeini who promoted revolution with audio tapes and written orders transmitted to his supporters in Iran.
After the coup, he returned to Iran and served as supreme leader, the ultimate arbiter of policy, until his death in 1989. His successor, Ali Khamenei (86), is a hardliner who has marginalised moderates and leftists and cracked down on political dissidents. He has close ties with the IRGC and is the chief target of current protesters.
“The Islamic Republic is in a vice, squeezed by the external threat from the US and Israel and the internal threat of a mass uprising,” Vali Nasr, a professor at the John Hopkins University in Washington, posted on X. “There is no easy escape from this impasse. A total collapse of the Islamic Republic is not necessarily imminent, but Iran’s revolution is now nearing its end,” he said.
Lead researcher at the Geneva Graduate Institute Farzan Sabet argued: “We are heading either toward regime change, or toward the establishment of a hybrid regime, where the religious front weakens but a large part of the current security, economic and political networks continue to govern, or even toward a [new] Islamic Republic, with significant institutional changes but the same forces in power, although the latter prospect is rapidly receding.”
He said the IRGC “or some elements within it, will play an influential role in each of these cases, in one form or another”.
