Supporters of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s deposed shah, were claiming the crowds out in the streets of Iran were a direct response to his call to action. They described it as a referendum on his leadership and that the response showed he had won.
Yet the issue of an alternative leadership for Iran remains unresolved. Many Iranians, eager to end the 47-year-long rule of the clerics, still view a return to monarchical rule with suspicion.
On the international stage, Donald Trump has yet to endorse Pahlavi.
Pahlavi’s supporters, including on the foreign satellite channels, highlight the many calls for the return of the shah being heard in the crowds. However, just as Trump did not rush to back the candidacy of the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, the US president is being equally cautious about Pahlavi, apparently fearing the US may end up entangled in a civil war.
The lack of a clear alternative leadership or even a single set of political demands by the protesters, apart from ending corruption, repression and inflation, has been a boon to Pahlavi since he at least has name recognition and has nurtured support for the monarchy for decades.
Others inside Iran capable of leading the country to a secular future, such as Narges Mohammadi and Mostafa Tajzadeh, have been locked in jail sporadically for years.
One Iranian described Iran as living in an era of no manifesto politics.
Pahlavi, calling on his supporters to take to the streets again on Friday, is due at an event in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, on Tuesday, but his team stressed he had not yet been granted a meeting with Trump, and the event, a Jerusalem prayer breakfast, was unconnected with the US president’s team.
In a sign of Trump’s caution, the president has also avoided acting on his unspecific pledge to come to the aid of the Iranians if they were being attacked.
Trump’s caution has led to reports the president may be exploring a deal with a breakaway group inside the government. Officials from Oman, traditional mediators between the US and Iran, are due in Tehran this weekend. Although desperation is setting in, there is no sign the panic that has swept parts of the government is forcing the supreme leader to rethink his determination to retain Iran’s uranium stockpile or aspirations to enrich uranium inside the country. For him it is a symbol of national sovereignty.
But Trump may also be wary of a full embrace of Pahlavi since it is possible to misinterpret the calls for his return.
In an internal analysis given to the Guardian, one Iranian said: “What is heard in the slogans today is not a call [to] return to the crown; it is an escape from a dead end. A society that has no way out retreats – not out of interest, but out of compulsion. This retreat is not a choice; it is the nervous reaction of a tired political body that no longer responds to prescriptions.
“For decades, society was told to ‘wait’. It waited. It was told ‘it will be fixed’. It wasn’t fixed. It was told ‘it can’t get worse, it’s enough’. It got worse. Then they said ‘we have no alternative’. And this was precisely the moment when the street created its own alternative; not with classical rationality, but with the instinct for survival.
“The monarchist slogan is not a declaration of love for Pahlavi: it is a declaration of disgust for the Islamic Republic. It is a cry of ‘no’ when no ’yes’ is available … Everyone is stuck in the past or in empty promises. When the horizon is empty, society looks back because it sees nothing ahead.”
The Iranian Writers’ Association also called for caution about “externally imposed solutions”.
“Freedom certainly will not fall from the sky with bombs and missiles from predatory powers. Those who have risen up against the status quo while maintaining their independence from domestic and foreign exploiters,” the group said. “Neither wait for repetition of an imaginary past and its heralds, nor wait for fake reformers.”
Pahlavi has long been disliked by the left in Iran. The Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company, one of the most prominent independent unions, said on Wednesday it opposed “the reproduction of old and authoritarian forms of power”.
“The path to liberation of workers does not lie through the path of a leader carved above the people nor by relying on foreign powers,” it added.
Either way, the current reformist Iranian leadership, struggling to understand the evaporation of the nationalism created by the 12-day war in June, has few solutions left. It can rally the people against what it claims are foreign malice and rioters. It can hope somehow the technocrats in the economics ministry and Central Bank have gathered the resources to stabilise the currency.
Ahmad Naghibzadeh, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Tehran, warned the solutions may no longer be technocratic, but historic. He told Euronews: “In the end, there will be no choice but to repeat in Iran what happened in Europe, that is, they decided the dispute between religion and state in favour of the state.”
