Iran's currency collapse is only part of the story |
Iran’s latest protest wave did not begin as a grand ideological crusade. It began the way breakdowns often do, with daily life becoming unlivable.
When a currency collapses, prices spiral, wages no longer cover basic needs and public services fail, politics stops being a debate over competing visions and becomes a referendum on endurance.
That is the core reality emerging from Iran today. People are not protesting because they suddenly discovered activism. They are protesting because the habits of coping, tightening their belts, leaning on family and waiting for conditions to improve have finally stopped working.
Exhaustion is not a mood. It is a political force.
This is why the protests are best understood as justified, even in the narrowest sense of the word. A state can reasonably demand obedience when it provides security and a minimum level of stability. When it cannot – or will not – protect the basic conditions of life, it forfeits the moral claim that dissent is illegitimate or harmful.
The regime’s response has been to deny that legitimacy outright. The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has not addressed citizens with grievances.
He has spoken of “vandals” and “harmful people,” framing protesters as tools of foreign powers. This is not simply rhetoric. It is a governing logic.
If protesters are defined as enemies, repression becomes defense, and lethal force can be justified as saving the nation.
Yet the regime’s own behavior undermines its narrative.
A government confident in its legitimacy does not need to plunge a country into an