🔶 Is the government losing its ability to suppress protests?

🔻A report by Omid Barin

Donald Trump’s recent remarks, the President of the United States, about the increasingly weakening Islamic Republic and the government’s lack of long-term resilience in the face of protests have once again brought to the forefront discussions about fault lines between society and the structure of power. By pointing to deadly repression and the use of lethal weaponry by security forces against protesters, Trump has emphasized that “the situation has reached the bone.”

But under conditions in which the heavy shadow of war, general inflation beyond 80 percent, and an unprecedented livelihood crisis are weighing on the lives of millions of Iranian citizens, a fundamental question arises: Does the continuation of these all-encompassing pressures paralyze the government’s suppression machinery against a possible nationwide uprising, or will a society caught in day-to-day survival experience another path?

To answer this question, DW Farsi spoke with four experts and observers of Iran’s affairs; Kavah Fathi, a journalist; Majid Golpor, an economist and sociologist; Reza Talebi, an analyst of Iran’s affairs; and Mahdieh Golrow, an activist and political analyst.

One of the most central challenges in analyzing the current situation in Iran is understanding the relationship between the expansion of the poverty line and waves of protest.

Citing that poverty does not necessarily lead to protests in a linear way, Kavah Fathi explains: “For workers and lower segments that have nothing to lose except minimum subsistence, the continuation of the existing situation in itself imposes a heavy cost. However, severe poverty creates a fundamental contradiction; on the one hand, it raises the motivation to protest, and on the other, because of daily dependence on subsistence-level income and the lack of financial backing, it reduces the ability to participate continuously.”

Fathi emphasizes that a turning point arrives when people feel that continuing the current situation carries a cost far higher than the cost of taking the risk of going to the streets— a process that shifts demands from the purely civil realm toward requests for subsistence and survival, but not necessarily meaning that the roots of political discontent are being abandoned.

When rising prices, unemployment, and the collapse of the value of the currency combine with a deep sense of injustice, the demand for bread is inevitably linked to a demand for structural change.

From a more structural perspective, Majid Golpor considers Iran’s economy a multi-structural system in which the arteries of wealth, banks, and energy resources are monopolized by a financial, religious, and security oligarchy.