Since late December 2025, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been swept by a wave of protests on a scale not seen since the 1979 revolution. While the extreme violence of the crackdown quickly attracted international attention, the dominant media narrative still too often tends to subsume the voices of the protesters under Western geopolitical interests. Nevertheless, understanding this uprising requires taking two realities into account: the political exploitation of the protests and the legitimacy of Iranian grievances.
On the night of December 28th, 2025, in Tehran, cries replaced silence. Bazaar traders, against a backdrop of hyperinflation and the collapse of the Iranian rial, stopped going to work to take to the streets in protest. Very quickly, what began as an economic protest turned into a political uprising. According to several accounts gathered by international media outlets, including Franceinfo, those first nights were marked by extremely brutal repression, although the exact extent of the violence remains difficult to ascertain due to internet blackouts and systematic censorship.
This rapid shift is not unprecedented in recent Iranian history: in 2009, during the so-called ‘green’ movement, in 2019, following the rise in fuel prices, and again in 2022, after the death of Mahsa Amini. Demands that were initially limited in scope had already evolved into a comprehensive challenge to the Iranian regime. In the winter of 2025/2026, the slogans changed in nature: “death to the dictator”, “down with the Islamic Republic”. The population no longer demands gradual reforms, but a structural and political break.
The authorities responded immediately. The non-governmental organisation (NGO) Amnesty International on January 9th, 2026 described the crackdown as ‘systematic and bloody’, characterised by the use of lethal weapons against unarmed protesters, large-scale arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances. Images authenticated by several NGOs show riot police firing live ammunition in densely populated areas, including residential neighbourhoods.
In early February 2026, the NGO Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) estimated that more than 50,000 people had been arrested since the start of the protest movement. Among them were dozens of foreign nationals, a fact regularly highlighted by the Iranian authorities to support their theory of a foreign conspiracy. The figures for fatalities remain extremely variable. Some local sources cite more than 30,000 victims, while others put forward much higher figures, with no independent verification currently available.
This uncertainty is itself, beyond being merely statistical, a political fact. The opacity imposed by the regime hinders any exhaustive investigation, which fuels both official propaganda and certain, sometimes hasty, extrapolations by the Western media.
As the Iranian people take to the streets, western capitals are speaking out. Since the end of January 2026, United States President Donald Trump has made a series of threatening statements, notably announcing the deployment of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln to the Persian Gulf. New oil sanctions have also been adopted, in a context already marked by high tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme.
These positions, relayed by western media, tend to reshape perceptions of the uprising. The Iranian protests are thus interpreted as yet another episode in the confrontation between Tehran and Washington, or even as a strategic lever serving American interests. This framing is not new: in 2009, the regime had already partially discredited the Green Movement by invoking foreign interference.
Nonetheless, reducing the current protests to a variable in American foreign policy explicitly simplifies their social, economic and historical origins. It also amounts to depriving Iranians of their own struggle.
BBC analyses, notably in an article dated January 12th, 2026, highlight the unprecedented nature of the current mobilisation, both in terms of its geographical scope and its duration. Unlike the Green Movement of 2009, which was mainly urban and driven by the middle classes, the recent protests span the entire social spectrum. They affect large cities as well as peripheral towns and regions that have long been marginalised in media coverage.
This cross-cutting nature partly explains the radical nature of the demands. Economic collapse, structural corruption, repression of women and minorities, and the humiliation caused by a highly security-conscious state are fuelling deep resentment. The Iranian regime’s occasional concessions, such as the announcement on February 4th, 2026 of a relaxation of the rules on women riding motorcycles, therefore appear to be belated, symbolic and an insufficient response to the crisis of legitimacy.
Taking Iranian protesters seriously means accepting the plurality, and sometimes contradictory nature of the slogans and references they use. Calls for the return of the Pahlavi dynasty, relayed from exile by Prince Reza Pahlavi, do not necessarily reflect widespread monarchist support, but more often the absence of a structured political alternative within the country, especially in a context where organised opposition has been neutralised.
This plurality is precisely what simplistic narratives tend to obscure. By focusing primarily on the role of the United States or the European Union which, since January 29th, 2026, has officially classified the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a ‘terrorist organisation’, media coverage risks reverting to a Western framing, where Iranian aspirations can be reduced to binary patterns.
Resisting the trap of geopolitical narratives does not mean denying international strategies or idealising protest. For journalism, it means maintaining a critical vigilance towards the political uses of uprisings, while recognising the reality of the violence suffered and the courage of those who continue to protest at the risk of their lives.
At a time when the Islamic Republic of Iran is both a theatre of internal strife and a global strategic hub, journalistic responsibility lies less in simplifying than in contextualising, less in projecting than in listening. For at the heart of this complex crisis lies not the west, but a street that refuses to remain silent.