January 3, 2026
By Dr. Franck Radjai, Director of Research at the CNRS and analyst at the Foundation for Middle East Studies (FEMO)
Update from the original version published at https://lediplomate.media/tribune-soulevement-iran-faux-recits-etouffer-revolte-reelle
On the sixth day of a rapidly intensifying uprising, Iran is revealing a reality the authorities are methodically trying to conceal: the existence of a deep-rooted protest movement—both political and national in nature—that goes far beyond short-term economic grievances.
The unrest began in Tehran’s historic Grand Bazaar, where merchants hit hard by the collapse of the national currency and runaway inflation launched a strike. The mobilization quickly spread to universities and to numerous cities across the country.
Very early on, the evolution of the slogans chanted in public spaces revealed the true nature of the movement. Calls such as “Death to the dictator,” “Down with the principle of the Supreme Leader (Velayat-e Faqih),” “Neither Shah nor Supreme Leader: democracy and equality,” or “Reformists, conservatives—your game is over” testify to a qualitative transformation of the protest: social anger has turned into a direct political challenge aimed at the entire theocratic architecture of power.
In its first days, the movement remained concentrated in Tehran and a few provincial cities. Faced with this momentum, the regime initially resorted to a classic delaying strategy. President Massoud Pezeshkian publicly acknowledged the “legitimacy” of economic grievances and called for dialogue. Far from calming the situation, this rhetoric revived a historically charged memory among many Iranians: that of the Shah declaring in November 1978 that he had “heard the voice of the revolution,” just months before his regime collapsed. Iranian history shows that belated verbal concessions rarely succeed in containing popular anger once it has reached political maturity.
From the third day onward, the regime was caught off guard. The movement spread to prestigious universities, prompting the authorities to harden their response through the arrest of student leaders and the pursuit of resistance cells. Campuses were temporarily silenced. The regime then declared nationwide holidays in an attempt to cut short the mobilization. Provincial cities immediately took over.
While trying to avoid direct confrontation, the regime nevertheless allowed its Revolutionary Guards and security forces to open fire on demonstrators attempting to seize the governor’s office in Fassa. Similar actions were carried out elsewhere: attacks on militia headquarters in Mashhad, repression centers, symbolic regime buildings, and even clandestine prisons in the provinces of Lorestan and Fars. By Sunday morning, the death toll among protesters had reached 24.
These movements, which rapidly grew in scale, are being driven by organized groups operating nationwide. Often composed of well-trained, determined young women and men—fast-moving and structured—these groups have overwhelmed the regime as repression intensified. Despite a carefully designed strategy aimed at preventing the uprising from crystallizing, the authorities failed. While the regime quickly mobilized its repressive forces, the resistance acted in a coordinated and deliberate manner, following a logic akin to a game of chess—a discipline in which Iranians traditionally excel.
In this process, the resistance units played a central role in disseminating, coordinating, and structuring the protests, particularly by circulating explicitly political and unifying slogans. These units, established since 2017 by the main opposition organization, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), represent a reality acknowledged by the regime itself.
On December 29, the Fars News Agency—close to the Revolutionary Guards—admitted that the protests were no longer limited to economic demands, referring to the actions of “organized cells” steering slogans toward openly political demands. The agency went so far as to acknowledge the impact of calls by Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the Iranian Resistance, advocating democracy, equality, and the separation of religion and state.
Faced with this dynamic, the regime quickly reverted to its tried-and-tested methods of neutralization. One of these is the deliberate infiltration of demonstrations. Plainclothes regime agents disguised as protesters were deployed in several marches to chant slogans in favor of the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty or the son of the deposed Shah. The aim was clear: to divert and fragment the mobilization, discourage participation, and blur its central message—the rejection of all forms of dictatorship and a profound aspiration for a democratic republic. The crowd’s response was swift. Protesters answered with the emblematic slogan of the 2022 uprising: “Death to the tyrant, whether Shah or Supreme Leader.”
These maneuvers have been widely denounced by independent sources and documented in several regions, notably Iranian Kurdistan and Mashhad, as well as on university campuses where infiltrators were exposed—sometimes detained by the crowd—after identification cards revealed their affiliation with the Basij militia. It should be noted that the tactic of using pro-Pahlavi slogans to discredit and discourage protesters was also developed and used by the regime during previous uprisings since 2018. Regime officials have publicly admitted that this tactic helps divert attention away from the real strength of the resistance on the ground toward a pseudo-opposition that poses no threat to the authorities.
Added to these practices is an equally decisive strategy: digital disinformation. Dozens of falsified videos are circulating on social media, using audio manipulation or synthetic voices to simulate pro-monarchist slogans. Technical analysis of several of these clips reveals obvious inconsistencies: lip-sync discrepancies, absence of ambient noise, and incoherent crowd behavior. In several cases where the original footage was identified, no pro-Pahlavi slogans were present. Some images were taken from student demonstrations in 2022 and recycled with fraudulent audio overlays.
Several of these videos were relayed by Persian-language satellite channels based abroad, known for promoting a nostalgic reading of the former regime.
These manipulations are part of a classic psychological warfare strategy: producing artificial polarization, shifting the center of gravity of the uprising, and ultimately attempting to preserve the status quo by obscuring the real demands—and by suggesting the absence of any viable alternative.
Yet at the heart of the current mobilization lies precisely what the regime seeks to render invisible: the existence of a structured, democratic, and republican political alternative. For decades, this option has been embodied by the coalition of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). It is founded on popular sovereignty, the separation of religion and state, equality between women and men, the abolition of the death penalty, and the rejection of all forms of authoritarianism—both theocratic and monarchical.
Through the Ten-Point Plan of its President-elect, Maryam Rajavi, this alternative offers a coherent roadmap for a democratic transition led by Iranians themselves, without foreign interference and without restoring the past.
It is precisely because this alternative exists, is organized, and is gaining support inside the country that the regime is deploying its campaigns of demonization and falsification with such relentlessness.
A rigorous examination of the facts leaves little room for doubt. The dominant slogans remain overwhelmingly anti-regime. Grievances linked to impoverishment, systemic corruption, repression, executions, and the structural deadlock of power are condensed into a widely shared slogan: “Death to the dictator.”
The real objective for the authorities, therefore, is to shift the axis of the conflict—from a confrontation between the people and dictatorship to an alleged “battle of alternatives.”
Every doctored video, every infiltrated agent, every fabricated slogan serves the same purpose: to weaken a simple and constant demand—freedom and democracy. These manipulation attempts have, moreover, lost effectiveness as the movement has spread to provincial cities and taken on the character of a direct confrontation between the people and the forces of repression.
The message carried by Iran’s streets remains clear, coherent, and unambiguous: neither Shah nor Supreme Leader, but freedom, equality, and popular sovereignty.