In Tehran’s commercial arteries, crisis announces itself before it appears on any chart.
It shows up as hesitation. A shopkeeper stares at a calculator and doesn’t type. Customers ask for a price and get a pause instead of a number. A sentence that sounds ordinary but carries an entire economy inside it: “I can’t tell you the price.”
When a currency collapses fast enough, trade stops being trade. It turns into a daily referendum on fear. People don’t just lose purchasing power; they lose the ability to plan, to trust, to imagine tomorrow. This is the soil from which the latest wave of protests grew. And it matters that the first visible ignition point was not a party headquarters or a manifesto, but the marketplace: phone malls, small shops, places where “the economy” ceases to be an abstraction and becomes rent, medicine, groceries, debt.
On December 28, 2025, shopkeepers in major commercial areas of Tehran shut their doors after a sudden jump in the exchange rate. What began as market paralysis quickly spilled into street protests, universities, and cities across the country. Within days, demonstrations had touched dozens of cities. The geography expanded even as repression followed: arrests, violence, and funerals policed as security threats.
This is the moment where economics stops being economics. A falling rial becomes a political event—not because people suddenly become ideological, but because currency collapse destroys the basic conditions of ordinary life: predictability, stability, and control over time itself.
Protests Did Not Emerge From a Vacuum
The street eruption of late 2025 did not appear suddenly. It was the visible crest of a much longer wave.
Between January and September 2025 alone, at least 896 labor-related events were recorded across Iran. Of these, 759 were direct protest actions—including 618 demonstrations and 141 strikes. Alongside them were 137 workplace accidents, a grim indicator that livelihood pressure does not stop at wages; it penetrates safety, exhaustion, and the body itself.
Livelihood was not a background issue in 2025. It was the engine of the labor field. The protests of winter were not a deviation from this trajectory; they were its continuation in a more explosive form.
Livelihood as a System of Pressure
If there is a single thread running through these events, it is not simply “low income.” It is organized instability.
The recorded demands repeat with striking consistency:
- Roughly 22 percent of actions involved unpaid or delayed wages.
- Around 17 percent centered on precarious contracts, outsourcing, and job insecurity.
- Nearly 13 percent explicitly addressed cost of living and survival.
- Over 11 percent were tied to insurance, healthcare, and social security.
This means livelihood in Iran is not one problem but a multi-channel mechanism of pressure. Wages fall behind. Contracts become fragile. Insurance erodes. Healthcare weakens. Families are forced into daily negotiations with institutions simply to survive. Protest, in this context, is not escalation—it is adaptation.
The spatial pattern of protests is telling. Tehran appears most frequently, but it is followed closely by Khuzestan, Isfahan, and Bushehr—regions dense with industry, energy infrastructure, and large-scale projects.
This is not accidental. Wherever “real economy” is concentrated—production, energy, contracting, urban services—the friction between economic policy and daily life intensifies faster. Where that friction becomes unbearable, the street appears.
The map of protest is, in effect, a map of economic contact points between capital and survival.
How Different Groups Translated Livelihood Into Protest
The protests were not homogeneous, but they were connected.
Retirees formed one of the most consistent blocs, with over 160 recorded actions. Their protests were regular, often weekly, with stable slogans and clear demands: pension equalization, healthcare, benefits, and income above the poverty line. This was not spontaneous anger; it was organized persistence.
In oil and gas—over 100 recorded actions—livelihood translated into a struggle against subcontracting, delayed wages, and discriminatory pay structures. The contradiction was stark: the core of national revenue sustained by the most precarious labor arrangements.
Industrial workers protested unpaid wages, shutdowns, and layoffs. Healthcare workers protested unpaid bonuses, overtime, and burnout—revealing a system in which those tasked with sustaining social health are themselves worn down by instability. Teachers protested poverty wages and insecurity, turning education into a warning signal: society economizing on its own future.
These are not separate stories. They are different languages spoken by the same crisis.
Why the Bazaar Ignited First
Bazaar have historically functioned as informal shock absorbers in Iran—smoothing inflation through credit, flexibility, and social networks. When merchants close shops and take to the street, it signals that these buffers have snapped.
In a currency collapse, the problem is not only higher costs but unknowable replacement prices. A merchant who sells today must restock tomorrow. If tomorrow’s exchange rate is unpredictable, today’s sale becomes tomorrow’s loss. Selling pauses. Stock disappears. Accusations replace transactions. Commerce turns into standoff.
When those who once absorbed shocks begin protesting, instability moves from balance sheets to streets.
Coreography
Authoritarian systems follow a familiar choreography in economic crises: blame speculators, warn of sabotage, and replace a visible manager to simulate action.
The replacement of the central bank chief followed this script. Such moves signal recognition that a threshold has been crossed, but they rarely address the structure beneath the crisis. Markets stabilize when constraints are credible. Societies stabilize when costs move upward rather than downward. A personnel change without structural confrontation reads as what it is: a ritual sacrifice to protect the system behind it.
Inflation here functions as governance. It quietly transfers losses from power networks to wage earners and consumers. It turns society into collateral.
During this wave, officials occasionally edged toward limited self-blame, urging people not to look for foreign culprits. This matters not because it signals reform, but because it signals stress. The preferred script—foreign plot, psychological warfare—loses traction when lived reality contradicts it.
Yet repression runs in parallel. Arrests, violence, intimidation, and the policing of funerals continued. This contradiction is not a flaw; it is the design. Empathy contains. Force disciplines. Agency is the line that cannot be crossed.
Iranian officials, including President Masoud Pezeshkian, have publicly stated that the government simply “does not have the money” to meet demands for higher wages and better social support, asking rhetorically “where should I get the money from?” when pressed on wage increases in Parliament. This remark came amid the parliamentary budget committee’s rejection of the government’s proposed 1405 (2026–27) budget framework, with lawmakers warning that the plan would further erode household purchasing power and rest on unrealizable revenue estimates. The public reaction to these statements highlights a broader distrust of budgetary allocations, with many questioning whether resources are actually unavailable or simply allocated to non-transparent, rent-based expenditures.
The War of Narratives: From the Street to Studios Outside the Field
As protests spread, the struggle shifted from streets to stories.
The state worked to securitize livelihood revolt as foreign orchestration. Simultaneously, external actors and right-wing exile media attempted to reframe the protests as proof that geopolitical pressure “works,” or as extensions of prepackaged political projects.
This pattern is not new. In January 2018 and November 2019, protests rooted in economic shock were stripped of their class content in competing narratives: security threats on one side, nationalist or nostalgic projects on the other. The current wave follows the same template with greater intensity.
The issue is not the existence of diverse slogans or voices. Streets are never uniform. The issue is weight—who turns marginal presence into dominant narrative. By shifting focus from livelihood to symbols, the social subject of protest is erased. Workers, small merchants, retirees, and the unemployed fade into background noise.
Narrative capture serves a clear function: it neutralizes protest by translating it into something safer for existing power structures.
What the state and narrative captors alike fear is the same thing: convergence. When workers, retirees, students, and small merchants recognize their struggles as structurally connected, scapegoats fail. Patience turns into a threat. Isolated grievances become shared diagnosis.
This is why livelihood protest is dangerous. It exposes a system that resolves crisis through volatility rather than accountability.
If the Structure Remains, the Pattern Will Repeat
As long as the political economy remains unchanged, cycles will continue. Officials will rotate. Speeches will multiply. Narratives will flood the air.
But a state cannot demand patience when it cannot offer predictability. When social time collapses, protest is not anomaly—it is rationality under permanent emergency.
The most revealing fact about this wave is not a slogan or confrontation, but convergence: when shock absorbers break, when endurance turns into refusal, and when the system—caught between apology and baton—reveals its core truth. It can administer suffering. It cannot tolerate agency.
In a society where the future has dissolved into fog, the street becomes the only place where reality sharpens.
Scrittore e giornalista indipendente, è un rifugiato politico ad Atene, in Grecia. Scrive regolarmente di Iran, Medio Oriente, violenza ai confini e condizioni dei rifugiati in Grecia e in Europa.