Iran International
Moderate insiders in Tehran are warning that the public’s alienation may have deprived the system of the very vehicle it once relied on to manage public anger.
For years, reformists and centrist pragmatists served as a pressure valve — urging participation, tempering public frustration, and giving voters the sense that gradual change was still possible.
But since the record-low turnout of 2024, when even many who voted for Masoud Pezeshkian described it as the last time they would give moderates a chance, their ability to channel discontent appears to have evaporated.
Moderates privately concede they cannot mobilize their base, cannot convert anger into engagement, and cannot claim any mandate to shape policy.
Leading moderate daily Arman Melli wrote on Monday that factions and political parties have offered very little to solve the country’s problems.
Conservative factions, it argued, “have offered no progressive discourse,” while reformist groups “have not changed their rhetoric since 1997” and remain “unattractive to the new generation.”
‘Not cutting through’
Saeed Hajjarian, once the moderates’ foremost theoretician and strategist, has diagnosed the same problem in even starker terms.
“Even the very few ideas put forward by reformists are not picked up by the elite, let alone finding their way into public dialogue,” he said last week, branding the situation tragicomic.
Iran is navigating simultaneous crises—economic freefall, deep factional feuds and lingering insecurity after a June war with Israel and the United States—without any credible political structure capable of absorbing or redirecting the public mood.
Pezeshkian cannot rely on party machinery that barely exists. Conservatives cannot mobilize a constituency they never cultivated and the generation that came of age after 2009 sees no reason to engage with institutions it views as irrelevant.
Deeper roots
The erosion of political parties was not accidental. The old Persian motto “politics is a bastard” endured because it reflected lived experience.
For more than seven decades, successive rulers have treated organized politics as a threat to be contained.
After the 1953 coup, thousands of activists in the Tudeh Party and National Front were jailed, teaching a generation that political engagement offered more peril than promise.
The Islamic Republic intensified this dynamic: the execution of thousands of leftists in the 1980s, followed by show trials in 2009, cemented the view that activism brings risk without protection.
These waves of repression produced what the state wanted: fragmented citizens, hollow parties, and political actors more responsive to power than to society.
Reformists were the exception—tolerated not because they posed a challenge but because they helped to manage one. For two decades they served as a controlled outlet for public frustration, a way to delay rupture rather than resolve it.
Now even that exception is failing, and moderates themselves are the first to sound the alarm.
Tehran’s unveiling of a towering statue depicting the Roman Emperor Valerian kneeling before pre-Islamic Persian King Shapur I has renewed criticism of the Islamic Republic’s appeal to nationalist sentiment following the June war with Israel.
For over forty years, the theocracy purged ancient Persian history from schoolbooks, replacing it with post-Islamic narratives. But after the 12-day conflict with Israel, officials have turned to the distant pre-Islamic past to rally a divided society.
From murals of ancient kings and soldiers to patriotic songs added to Shi’ite mourning ceremonies performed before Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Tehran now embraces imagery once deemed heretical by its own revolutionary ethos.
'Kneel before Iran' campaign
Tehran’s Revolution (Enghelab) Square was the scene of an unusual spectacle on Friday as officials unveiled a massive bronze statue depicting Roman Emperor Valerian kneeling in submission before Sassanid King Shapur I, commemorating Iran’s victory at the Battle of Edessa (260 AD).
The event was held under the slogan “Kneel before Iran,” part of what authorities describe as a campaign to project “national unity and historical pride” following the June war with Israel.
Tehran Mayor Alireza Zakani, a staunch ultraconservative, said on X: “Enmity with Great Iran can only end in kneeling before this historic nation.”
Municipal official Davood Goodarzi said the installation would be accompanied by visual displays depicting “other victories of Iranians over foreign aggressors,” including the defeat of British forces by local commander Rais-Ali Delvari, Mirza Kuchak Khan’s resistance against Russian troops, and Surena’s triumph over Rome at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE.
The goal, Goodarzi said, is “strengthening concepts such as national dignity, social unity, and Iranian identity.”
The statue, he said, would remain temporarily at Revolution Square before being moved to a city gateway “where it will stand as the first emblem of Iran before diplomats and foreign visitors.”
Unveiled women were allowed to attend the unveiling ceremony—an uncommon scene at events organized by Tehran’s ultra-hardline municipality.
The turn to the pre-Islamic past
The sharp reversal also recalls remarks once made by Khamenei. In a 2011 speech, he asserted that “all the great military victories of this nation came after Islam,” dismissing pre-Islamic accounts as “things that are not documented.”
In 1987, he had said that prophets triumphed over kings such as Cyrus and that “nothing remains of these monarchs in history but names remembered with derision.”
Nevertheless, pro-government social media accounts have now gone so far as to circulate posters equating Khamenei himself with Shapur, showing him standing with a staff as Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump kneel before him. The caption reads: “You will kneel before Iran.”
'Hypocrisy'
Pro-government figures have hailed the move as a patriotic success. Conservative political reporter Hossein Saremi posted: “Today’s grand Iranian gathering showed that people and the state share one essence: Iran itself. Nothing can take our homeland away.”
Others, however, called the spectacle “hypocrisy.” Journalist Gholamhossein Pashaei wrote on X: “Every year you close Pasargadae to stop people from celebrating Cyrus Day, yet you unveil Shapur’s statue in Enghelab Square with drums and fireworks during Fatimiyya (mourning period)!”
Dissident commentator Hamid Asafi called the ceremony “a perfect snapshot of the Islamic Republic’s contradictions.”
On Telegram he wrote: “A week ago they closed Cyrus’s tomb out of fear of the crowds, and now they glorify Shapur in the same breath. The Islamic Republic fears living history but poses for selfies with its corpse.”
He added: “They know people no longer respond to rosaries and sermons. That’s why they’ve brought history back to the stage—in a controlled costume. If they can’t erase the past, they’ll try to own it.”
The irony deepened as UNESCO formally recognized Cyrus’s Charter as one of the earliest human-rights documents.
President Masoud Pezeshkian wrote on X: “Iran, the cradle of dialogue, justice, and coexistence, can still inspire peace today.”
Users swiftly replied, questioning how such pride could coexist with a government that blocks access to Cyrus’s tomb each year to those wishing to visit it on his birthday.