Escalation of anti-government protests in Iran

On 15 and 16 November, a new wave of protests took place across the Islamic Republic of Iran. Precisely, after a few weeks of relative calm, thousands of protesters organised marches and initiatives in at least 36 locations around the country to commemorate the victims of the 2019-2020 uprising, known as ‘Bloody November’, which broke out due to uncontrolled fuel price increases and was harshly repressed by the security forces.

Confirming the trend established in the three months since the start of the protests triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini, the most active provinces were those in the northwest, Western Azerbaijan and Iranian Kurdistan, where the presence of minorities traditionally hostile to the central authorities is strong. Unlike the rest of the country, the level of confrontation in these areas has never dropped and in the past few hours two members of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, deployed to support the police in their repression activities, have been shot dead. The provinces of Esfahan and Fars have also been very active in recent days, while harsh clashes between demonstrators and police forces have been recorded in the capital Tehran where barricades have also been set up. Slogans and posters against conservative President Ebrahim Raisi and Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei were prominent, demonstrating the growing anti-systemic character of the unrest.

Also contributing to the new wave of anger was the start of the trials, many of them held in public, of protesters arrested during the protests. An estimated 15,000 Iranians are awaiting sentencing and many of them also risk the death sentence for taking part in the demonstrations.

The crescendo of protests could continue in the coming days, which represent a useful test of the resilience of the movement, so far essentially student-driven and therefore unable to pose an existential threat to the leadership of the Islamic Republic. Over the coming weeks, the challenge will be to overcome the structural limits of the protest movement related to the absence of a recognised leadership and the low participation of workers, limited to occasional strikes in the oil and mining sectors. Moreover, in order to facilitate the transformation of the movement into a nationwide uprising, the protesters should permanently shift the epicentre of the protests from the peripheral areas of the country to the large urban centres, i.e. Tehran, Esfahan and Karaj, just as happened in the last 48 hours.