The 2025-2026 Iran Protests: Structural Drivers, Protest Demands, and Regime Repression
This report provides an analytical overview of the nationwide protest movement that emerged in Iran in December 2025. It examines the protests’ timing, initial triggers, underlying structural drivers, geographic spread, social composition, articulated demands, and the response of state authorities. The immediate catalyst for the protests was a sharp economic shock marked by the collapse of the Iranian rial to historically unprecedented levels, intensifying long-standing concerns over inflation, unemployment, declining purchasing power, and widespread poverty. Beyond this trigger, the report situates the protests within a broader context of entrenched economic deprivation, authoritarian governance, pervasive social control, political repression, ideological rule, and environmental degradation.
The protests originated in Tehran and rapidly expanded nationwide, with documented activity across 222 locations in 78 cities and 26 provinces within eight days, indicating a sustained and geographically diffuse mobilization rather than a localized or sector-specific movement. Participation has spanned multiple social groups, including shopkeepers, students, women, workers, and younger generations. Despite this diversity, protest demands have converged around explicit rejection of the Islamic Republic as a governing system and calls for regime change rather than reform, including open expressions of support for monarchical restoration and Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.
State responses have followed established patterns of repression, including mass arrests, use of force, reported fatalities, and restrictions on communication. The report concludes that the protests reflect the cumulative impact of long-standing structural grievances and represent a further consolidation of a post-2017 trajectory in which reformist expectations have largely been abandoned, signalling a deepening crisis in regime–society relations and continued domestic volatility.
