The current wave of protests unfolding in Iran marks a fundamental departure from previous ones. This difference is not limited to the nature of the demands, but extends to the identity of the actor that sets them in motion, and to the authorities’ inability to contain them or respond appropriately.
This time, the protests did not emerge from social margins or minority groups, nor were they sparked by traditional opposition forces. They originated from the very heart of the regime’s economic base: the bazaar. In Iran, the bazaar is not merely a space for trade, but a socio-political and religious institution with deep historical symbolism. It has long constituted one of the three pillars of governance in modern Iran alongside the palace and the mosque. For this reason, the eruption of protest from within the bazaar cannot be read as an ordinary act of dissent, but rather as a highly sensitive shift that strikes at the core of the system.
The bazaar wields a layered form of power, combining traditional religious capitalism, a socio-professional and rights-based collective body, and a complex web of interests linking it to clerics, the Revolutionary Guards, and centers of influence within the state. While these alliances have historically underpinned regime stability, they have also endowed the bazaar with an exceptional capacity to undermine it, not only through direct street confrontation, but by withdrawing from the long-standing historical understanding that governed its relationship with power.
A comparison with earlier protest waves in 2017, 2019, and 2022 makes this dynamic clear. Those episodes largely reflected socio-economic explosions driven by livelihood pressures and were weakened by their lack of decisive leverage. By contrast, the current bazaar protest, though still relatively limited in scale, exerted pressure from its very first moment, directing its blow straight at the decision-making center.
This explains the regime’s anxiety and confusion in the early days of the protests, evident in its rush to offer economic concessions through coordination between the government and parliament, and under implicit guidance from the Supreme Leader. These measures included suspending the implementation of the taxpayer system, value-added tax, fines, and new licensing requirements for a full year. These were long-standing demands of the bazaar that had previously been ignored, only to be conceded belatedly, after protests had already spread beyond the bazaar, both geographically and politically.
In general, these responses failed to contain the crisis. On the contrary, protests continued and expanded, incorporating political slogans and demands, alongside repression and violence. The movement entered its third week amid escalating warning signs, including the killing of protesters and the possibility of Donald Trump acting on his threat to strike the regime.
Despite this, major city bazaars joined Tehran’s bazaar in protest, starting with Tabriz, a city of profound historical and national symbolism as the capital of the first Safavid state and a center of Azerbaijani Turkish identity, followed by Isfahan, Shiraz, and Mashhad. This expansion amounted to an additional message from the bazaar: the crisis is no longer confined to tax burdens or fiscal policies, but reflects a deepening rupture between the political authority and its traditional allies. It is a public outcry revealing, for the first time, that the problem lies not only in the rigidity of laws, but in their fragility and instability, in abrupt and repetitive shifts in economic policy, sudden reversals without clear justification, and above all in the dominance of the Revolutionary Guards over the economy as a partner holding the largest share of everything.
Moreover, the bazaar’s mobilization carries a political dimension no less dangerous than the economic one. Historically, the bazaar has been a central pillar of legitimacy in the Iranian state across its modern incarnations—Qajar, Pahlavi, and Islamic—and has played decisive roles in the Tobacco Protest, the Constitutional Revolution, the oil nationalization movement, and the 1979 revolution. When a key partner in governance turns into a force of protest, it signals an internal political fracture that strikes at the heart of regime legitimacy. It reveals that the epicenter of the crisis has shifted from the street to within the structure of power itself, evoking a familiar scene on the eve of the monarchy’s collapse, when the bazaar turned against its alliance with the state and directly contributed to its downfall.
From this perspective, the current protests cannot be described merely as a situational reaction to currency collapse, rampant corruption, or the dominance of a military-security force over the economy. They represent a crisis within the institutions of decision-making, triggered by pressure on one of the three pillars of rule, at a time when the other two are unable to bear or balance the burden. In this context, the regime’s belated economic concessions appear as palliative measures that ease the pain without curing the disease. If the authorities continue to treat the bazaar’s mobilization as a containable economic file, they risk pushing it from the position of a dissenting partner into that of a rebelling one, equipped with the real tools to bring the system down.
Regardless of what unfolds in the streets and irrespective of the threats and warnings issued by the United States, Israel, or Reza Pahlavi II, once the bazaar, with its historical and symbolic weight, enters into an open confrontation with the regime, it signals that the latter has entered a serious path toward collapse. At that point, the pressing question is no longer when or how the protests will end, but whether the regime itself will survive.
