The massive new protests in Iran, explained

Iran is being rocked by its biggest wave of protests in nearly a decade. Since December 28, tens of thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets in huge numbers of towns and cities to demand freedom from their theocratic government. At least 20 people have since been killed in clashes with security forces, and hundreds of mostly young people have been arrested, per news reports.

The demonstrations began as small gatherings protesting a slow economy in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city; over the past week they’ve morphed into a wave of major demonstrations in which ordinary Iranians are often heard calling for a revolution against the country’s theocratic government.

But this massive movement — one with the potential to reshape the Middle East — has a pretty mundane cause.

“It started over a protest over the price of eggs, believe it or not,” says Hussein Banai, a professor at Indiana University who studies Iran.

Iran’s economy, heavily focused on the oil industry, has been a mess for a long time — marked particularly by high levels of inflation, unemployment, and inequality. Iran’s president, the relatively reformist Hassan Rouhani, has made improving Iran’s economy one of the core parts of his political identity.

Rouhani sold the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States and several other international powers, his biggest accomplishment to date, as an economic measure. Rouhani argued that relief from US and European sanctions, offered in exchange for tight restrictions on Iran’s nuclear development, would lead to boom times. He won his reelection bid, in May 2017, in no small part due to these promises.

Rouhani has had some successes, most notably in curbing inflation and improving economic growth. But he has yet to deliver the fundamental change he promised; the most recent World Bank data put unemployment around 12.7 percent, and poverty rates actually increased under Rouhani. In December 2017, he announced a budget that proposed a hike in gas prices, which — given the central role of gas in Iran’s economy more broadly — would hit Iran’s working class.

Prices of basic goods had, in the past year, increased by roughly 40 percent. At the same time, Iran had a stroke of bad luck: An outbreak of bird flu forced the country to slaughter some 17 million chickens. The hen shortage produced by the cull, combined with Rouhani’s budget, caused egg prices to spike by 50 or even 100 percent, depending on which estimate you use.

The price of eggs became a symbol for Iran’s broader economic problems — and the failure of the Rouhani government to solve them. When protesters first assembled on December 2018 in Mashhad, this is what their chanting focused on, saying things like, “No to high prices,” and, “Death to Rouhani.”

There’s a theory among some Iran watchers that these protests weren’t spontaneous — that they were actually organized by conservative Iranian politicians. Mashhad is dominated by a conservative religious charity, whose directors are aligned with Rouhani’s enemies. It’s not crazy to think that they were exploiting Iran’s economic woes to undermine the president’s support.

“It probably had the support of hardliners there,” Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, says of the initial protest. “It’s hard to imagine that authorities would have allowed this protest to take place. And the kind of finger pointing, which is solely targeting Rouhani, is rare.”

This theory is hard to prove. But if it’s true, then it backfired terribly.

It started to go wrong for them, experts say, when more and more people joined the Mashhad protests. These newcomers shifted the tone of the protest blaming Rouhani for the poor economic performance to blaming the Iranian government and political system more broadly.

Then the protests began spreading to dozens of towns and cities across Iran. By January 2, protests had been recorded “in nearly every province” in the country, according to the Associated Press. And these protests were targeting not just the Rouhani presidency but the Islamic Republic itself — chanting, “Death to the dictator” (referring to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei), and, “Death to the Revolutionary Guard,” referring to Iran’s security forces. They’ve also called out the government’s support for the Assad regime, questioning why Iran is spending money there when there are problems at home.

“People are protesting the system,” says Banai. “Over and over, you hear [from protesters] that the system is this enigmatic, nontransparent entity — in which not just all manner of arbitrary political decisions are made but also a great deal of wealth disappears.”

The socioeconomic roots of the protests, in short, have now linked up with deeper political dissatisfaction with a government that has failed to deliver on its promises to make ordinary Iranians’ lives better.

These protests are a serious threat to the regime

Iran’s government is a strange beast. Parts of it, like the legislature and the presidency, are elected. But basic rights to free expression and protest are tightly controlled, and candidates who are seen as too subversive are barred from running for office. Fundamental authority rests with Supreme Leader Khamenei, an unelected cleric, who has untrammeled authority to override the presidency’s policy decisions if he so chooses.

Experts say this is why the spread of protests and the change in their rhetoric is so important. Blaming Rouhani for Iran’s economic problems is entirely acceptable for Iran’s most senior leadership; presidents can and often are replaced. Blaming the system for the same problems, by contrast, is calling the whole idea of an Islamic Republic into question.

“It’s the maximalism in terms of slogans that’s so surprising,” Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy, says. “This is not a movement that’s pulling punches.”

What’s more, the nature of the protests is anything but typical for Iran. For one thing, the protests don’t seem to have any clear leaders. Iran observers are baffled as to how they spread so quickly, offering only guesses rather than firm conclusions.

“I don’t think anyone has a good answer” as to how the protests spread, Vaez says. “It seems like the ground was ripe for people to join in without much coordination; obviously social media played a role.”

The demographics of the protesters are also surprising. The protesters in 2009 were mostly highly educated upper-middle-class urbanites in Tehran. Today, Tehran appears to be following the lead of the rest of the country. Demonstrations are cropping up in relatively poor villages and towns in more rural areas, suggesting to observers that this movement has more of a working-class base than the last wave of protests.

Vaez says these new protests resemble, in many ways, the 2011 Arab Spring protests that toppled a number of Middle Eastern dictators.

“From what we saw in the Arab uprisings,” he says, “these kinds of movements that have wide popular appeal but don’t have leadership or organization or a specific mission can create momentum that really goes beyond anything the leadership in the country could expect.”

Why the regime isn’t panicking — yet

Despite these trends, however, observers do not believe that the fall of Iran’s government is likely to happen in the immediate future.

This is partly because the protests are much smaller than they were in 2009, when millions took to the streets. Research by Erica Chenoweth, a scholar at the University of Denver who studies nonviolent revolutions, finds that the size of protests matters: that governments almost always fall when 3.5 percent of the population or more engage in sustained nonviolent activity. In Iran, a country of more than 80 million people, that would mean roughly 3 million people on the streets regularly challenging the regime. There’s no evidence of that happening — at least not yet.

The Iranian regime also has not deployed all of the weapons at its disposal to crush the protests. Isolated clashes between police and protesters have led to 20 deaths, but there’s not yet evidence to suggest a mass deliberate effort to end the protest movement by force. The Revolutionary Guard, the Iranian regime’s elite armed forces, has a much greater capacity to repress protests than it has used so far.

This suggests the Iranian government has yet to conclude that this constitutes an existential threat, that they’re not yet so worried about the anti-regime chanting that they feel a need to repress it with major shows of force.

“This is a very effective and savvy security service,” Maloney says. “They will seek to try to deescalate, using violence [if] necessary, but not in a way that’s likely to provoke further outcry.”

All of this is to say: Iran isn’t on the verge of revolution yet. But things could still escalate an unpredictable way, leading to violent repression, bigger protests, and more serious political instability in the country. Experts warn there are already signs that the government is preparing for this to get more serious.

“Just today, I spoke to some of my family members who are dissidents [in Iran],” Banai says. “One of them received calls from anonymous intelligence officials saying, ‘We’re watching you closely; be very careful about the next steps you take.’ So I think the security services are stepping in, and there are all signs of a crackdown emerging.”

The debate over what America’s role should be in all of this

When the last round of mass protests hit Iran in 2009, there was a serious debate over whether the United States should vocally align itself with the protesters.

The Obama administration declined to do so, on grounds that it would make the protesters seem like tools of American interests. Republican critics, both in Congress and elsewhere, argued that the protesters would benefit from American moral support — that, indeed, some protesters were calling on President Obama (who was popular in Iran at the time) to stand up for them.

Today, the US government faces a similar dilemma, albeit under a very different administration: Should the president endorse the protesters’ calls for an end to the regime and provide whatever support he can, or stay relatively quiet and avoid getting in the way?

President Trump has so far tweeted in support of the protests several times, writing that “the people of Iran are finally acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime.” US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley has called for two separate UN emergency sessions to discuss the situation, and a State Department official called on Iran to stop blocking some social media and gave protesters advice on how to circumvent censorship.

Experts disagree on how effective any Trump administration support will be in encouraging protests. One thing they all agreed on, though, is that the Trump administration’s current travel ban, which places tight restrictions on Iranian citizens entering the US, makes it extremely difficult for the United States to credibly support them.

Repealing the ban, experts say, is the single most obvious thing that could be done to encourage the protesters.

“It’s an affront to all Iranians. You can’t tell Iranians that you have their back when they confront the regime if you’re not willing to let them in your country,” Maloney says. “If you’re uncertain about going to the streets, knowing that you have somewhere to go is possibly a small encouragement. Many Iranians came here after 2009.”

Ultimately, though, the Washington debate — often bitter and partisan — is a bit of a sideshow. The US has some influence, but this is first and foremost a struggle between ordinary Iranians and their government. The protests will succeed or fail based not on what happens in Washington, but on what happens in Iran.

“This is a set of circumstances that very few outside analysts anticipated, and that Iranians themselves did not appear to be prepared for,” Maloney says. “[It is] impossible to predict exactly where it ends.”

Original Article
Source: vox.com
Author:  Zack Beauchamp