For more than a week, Shirin has waited for news of her sister in Tehran. “I knew that she’s going to protest,” says the Iranian-Australian engineer, whose name has been changed to protect her family members. “Everyone actually feels that responsibility to go out.”
That was on January 8. Already human rights agencies were reporting that dozens of people had been killed in the protests, which began late last year in the city’s bazaars as the currency’s value deteriorated.
The same day, Iran’s leaders cut internet access, imposing a digital blackout that has made calls and messages impossible.
“There is always a chance that my sister will be in prison,” Shirin says. “I don’t know whether she’s alive or not.”
Amid the fear, however, there is also hope that this round of protests might achieve what those in 2009, 2017-2018 and 2022 could not: the end of the Islamic Republic.
An anti-government protest in Tehran.Credit: AP
Under an internet blackout, the already difficult task of making predictions becomes harder still. Iran’s leaders are practiced at putting down uprisings. President Donald Trump, who promised “help is on its way”, has so far held back from military strikes even as the confirmed death roll rises above 2600, according to the human rights group HRANA. The US has announced new sanctions instead.
At the same time, the demonstrations – which have spread throughout the provinces – are the largest in the 46 years the theocratic regime has held power.
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“The question is not if it will fall, but when,” Kylie Moore-Gilbert, the Australian analyst imprisoned by Iran for more than two years on unsubstantiated spying charges, wrote this week.
“The catastrophic collapse of Iran’s economy, coupled with widespread outrage at the unimaginable cruelty of the brutal crackdown … almost guarantees another round of protest.”
But if a revolution succeeds and citizens tear down the watchful portraits of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from the walls, who will replace him? Who writes the next chapter for a country with a Persian history dating back five millennia?
The name of one leader has been chanted from cities to the countryside, the son of an autocrat, who promises not to become one himself.
In 1978, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi visited the Great Barrier Reef, dined with the governor of NSW and spent time at the War Memorial in Canberra as part of an official visit.
Soon after, the 17-year-old moved to the United States to train as a fighter pilot at a Texas airbase.
His father Mohammad Reza, the shah or king of Iran, was close to the US. A 1953 coup by American and British intelligence agencies had installed him as the country’s undisputed leader.
But over time, frustrations built up among the public.
The Crown Prince of Iran, Prince Reza Pahlavi, lays a wreath at the Australian War Memorial.Credit: Fairfax Media
Mohammad Reza, although undeniably repressive, failed to contain an opposition movement led by hardline clerics. Powerless in the face of the Islamic revolution, he fled the country in 1979 and died of cancer in Cairo the following year.
Pahlavi, his eldest son, has never returned to his homeland. He qualified as a pilot, raised a family, wrote books and gave speeches advocating for an end to the Iranian regime. He lives in America and has visited Israel. Once a marginal figure, the 65-year-old’s standing among Iranians has risen in the past five years.
“They see him as a legitimate alternative that’s trustworthy,” says Parisa Glass, who came to Australia in the ’80s after fleeing Iran on foot to avoid persecution as a follower of the Baha’i faith. “Above all else, they want to make sure that Iran and Iranians remain united.”
Last week, Pahlavi called on protesters to reclaim public spaces and begin chanting at precise times. Hundreds of thousands followed his call. Chants of “Long live the shah” could be heard in social media videos uploaded before the blackout.
In a later post on X, Pahlavi urged workers in key industries to strike, security forces to defect and protesters to “seize the city centres”.
“Getting people to leave their homes and take to the streets in Iran is extremely difficult,” Amin Naeni, a researcher at Deakin University, says. “Even the Islamic Republic itself did not expect Pahlavi’s call to receive such a response, which is why the internet remained online for almost two hours after protests linked to his call began.”
Protesters hold up placards showing Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi in London.Credit: AP
The close relationship his father enjoyed with the United States is no longer the problem for Pahlavi it once was. The regime’s anti-American narrative has lost its bite, especially with young people, according to Naeni and other analysts. Nostalgia for the prosperity and secular freedoms enjoyed pre-1979 adds to the appeal.
Pahlavi promises to act not as a king but as “a servant of my people”. He told CBS News this week: “I’m here to be the honest broker above the fray, in complete neutrality, making sure however that we have a fully transparent democratic transition.”
Yet, Pahlavi has held on to his crown prince title. His supporters call him shah.
“What guarantees that he wouldn’t be another Mohammad Reza shah and rule the way his father ruled?” asks Mohammad Ghaedi, a professorial lecturer at George Washington University.
“These are some of the real concerns in Iran, and a lot of [Iranians] didn’t join the protest, although they really, really, really hate the Islamic Republic.”
The monarchists backing Pahlavi are only one opposition faction vying to control a future free Iran.
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In 2023, the crown prince joined with seven other diaspora leaders, including actor Nazanin Boniadi, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, and former football captain Ali Karimi. They promised to come up with a charter of shared values.
Soon they had published the Mahsa Charter, named after Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, who died at the hands of Iran’s morality police after allegedly failing to wear her headscarf.
But the coalition fell apart less than two months later, The Washington Post reported this week, “riven by disagreements over membership, a lack of strategic thinking and organising, and the harsh opposition of much of Pahlavi’s base of support”.
Where the diaspora opposition has splintered, potential leaders from within Iran have been repeatedly jailed.
In July, former deputy interior minister Mostafa Tajzadeh was given a five-year sentence for statements he had made from prison. Narges Mohammadi, who was awarded the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize for her activism, was taken to hospital after a violent arrest in December, according to her family.
Prominent Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi (right), listens to Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi in Tehran in 2007.Credit: AP
“Let’s not forget that many Iranians were fighting for decades inside Iran. They were imprisoned, they were persecuted,” says Alam Saleh, lecturer in Iranian Studies at the Australian National University. Dedicated activists would be unlikely to hand power to a leader such as Pahlavi “just because he was the son of someone”.
Without a stable government providing security, Iran’s ethnic groups – including Kurds, Turks and Arabs – may pursue their own interests more aggressively in borderlands with neighbouring countries, Saleh adds.
And then there is the potential danger posed by senior military and security figures with little to lose after being purged from their roles.
“Even if the regime collapses, the Revolutionary Guard will not disappear easily,” says Saleh. “I mean, look at the Iraqi experience after the fall of Saddam … They were fighting. And, actually, they joined Daesh [Islamic State].”
Pahlavi has said a new government would need to keep elements of the bureaucracies and judiciary in place, while insisting those with hands “soiled in the blood of Iranians” must face justice.
Video circulating on social media purportedly shows images from a morgue with dozens of bodies and mourners after the crackdown on the outskirts of Iran’s capital Tehran.Credit: AP
In a post to Truth Social, Trump has urged Iranians to “save the names of the killers and abusers,” saying “they will pay a big price”.
The last line of Trump’s post – “help is on its way” – led to speculation the president could order military strikes. Iran closed its air space and the US removed some personnel from bases in the region.
Pahlavi, before Trump’s election, said the US should not intervene militarily. More recently, however, he has called for America to come to Iran’s aid. Ghaedi, from George Washington University, says Iranians can read between the lines.
“A lot of people’s interpretation is that he’s talking about military attack,” he says. On Wednesday, Pahlavi met with senator Lindsey Graham, one of the MAGA movement figures most in favour of armed interventions.
So far, though, the United States has refrained from ordering either symbolic strikes or more lasting bombardments.
Another option would be to try to assassinate or capture the ayatollah. Only a fortnight ago, the US captured and arrested one of Iran’s closest allies, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, accusing him of running a “corrupt, illegitimate government” fuelled by drug trafficking.
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But the US is unlikely to use “the Maduro model” in Iran, according to United States Studies Centre director of research Jared Mondschein. To advance in government, officials need to show complete loyalty. Often, they have been selected for their ideological fervour, commentators note.
“Just cutting out one aspect of the regime – I find that hard to imagine,” Mondschein says. “It’s almost too deep, in many ways, for a change in the top to really change the dynamics.” He expects that a compromise – a new autocrat willing to abandon the country’s nuclear ambitions, for example – would also be rejected by the people of Iran.
Asked whether Iranians would accept any variation on the current government, refugee Parisa Glass is adamant. “Absolutely not,” she says. “The root is rotten. It has to go, and new things planted in its place.”
Shirin says the Islamic Republic’s leaders do not even deserve to be called a regime. “They’re like a terrorist mob,” she says. “And they have taken 90 million people hostage.”
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