The protests that began in Iran in late December 2025 have escalated rapidly. What was initially portrayed in Western coverage as another episode of "economic unrest" has, over recent days, turned into sustained mass mobilisation across cities nationwide, with protesters returning to the streets night after night.
While triggered by an economic shock, the protests have converged on a clear political demand: the end of the Islamic Republic. What is unfolding is not merely a domestic crisis, but a political rupture with direct implications for Europe's security and energy interests, as well as its strategic posture toward Russia and the Middle East.
Iran's crisis is not reducible to economic dissatisfaction alone. It is rooted in decades of political exclusion, systemic corruption, and a state that has lost both the willingness and the capacity to provide basic economic security.
These pressures have produced a growing sense of relative decline, as Iranians increasingly compare their circumstances with neighbouring societies that offer greater predictability, functioning public services, and economic horizons that do not shrink year after year.
Social media has intensified this dynamic. Younger Iranians are constantly exposed to the everyday lives of peers across the region and beyond, measuring not abstract ideals but lived realities such as mobility, opportunity, dignity, and future prospects.
Against this backdrop, Iran has entered another cycle of mass mobilisation, following a pattern that stretches from the contested 2009 election to the 2022 "woman, life, freedom" uprising.
By late 2025, renewed unrest was widely anticipated. The immediate trigger was the sharp depreciation of the rial: by December, the exchange rate had reached roughly 1.4m rials per US dollar, while inflation hovered around 42 percent year on year, pushing basic necessities beyond reach for millions.
These shocks reflect the Islamic Republic's strategic choices: prolonged confrontation over its nuclear program, a destabilising regional posture, and a domestic budget that indexed wages far below inflation while preserving generous allocations to institutions tied to the supreme leader.
The message was unmistakable: sacrifice is expected from the public, not from those in power.
Although the uprising began with an economic shock, it quickly shifted into direct political confrontation. Within hours, chants targeted the system itself and the supreme leader, reflecting a conclusion many Iranians have reached after decades of failed reform attempts: the Islamic Republic is not reformable through technocratic adjustment.
From Ayatollah Khomeini’s doctrine of exporting revolution to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s calls for an alternative Islamic global order, the regime has consistently framed itself in opposition to the prevailing international system
What distinguishes this moment is a shift in the balance between repression and resistance. Absolute poverty has expanded, the middle class has eroded, and economic pain is both widespread and visibly unequal.
At the same time, the regime's coercive apparatus appears more violent, but less coherent.
Since 2009, Tehran relied on calibrated repression combining street violence, mass arrests, executions, digital intimidation, and transnational pressure. Today, that system shows strain.
Lower-ranking security forces face the same economic pressures as the public, affecting morale and discipline, while organisational capacity has been disrupted by regional escalation and Israeli strikes in 2025 targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) infrastructure linked to internal security.
Opposition signals have also become clearer and more unified. Protests are geographically widespread and sustained, with slogans converging rapidly across cities.
Within this environment, growing numbers of Iranians are rallying around crown prince Reza Pahlavi as a focal point in a fragmented opposition landscape, with demonstrations in early January openly calling for regime change.
For Europe, this uprising is not merely Iran's internal affair. The Islamic Republic poses a direct challenge to European security.
Tehran is a close military partner of Russia, and Iranian-designed drones and missile technologies have been deployed against Ukraine. Its missile program and nuclear trajectory remain destabilising factors in Europ's strategic neighbourhood.
More fundamentally, the Islamic Republic is one of the most durable examples of a modern state governed by an explicitly ideological project rooted in political Islam.
From Khomeini’s doctrine of exporting revolution to his calls for an alternative Islamic global order, the regime has consistently framed itself in opposition to the prevailing international system. This posture has shaped decades of proxy warfare, political violence, and confrontation with Europe and its partners.
A secular Iran operating as a conventional member of the international system would represent a strategic shift for Europe: reduced security threats, diminished support for Russia's war effort, and the stabilisation of a major regional power.
Iran's market of nearly 90 million people and its energy potential should be understood as foundations for mutual economic normalisation under transparent rules, benefiting both Europe and Iranians alike.
But Europe's response so far has been hesitant and fragmented. A coherent Iran strategy is overdue. In the short term, the EU can take meaningful steps: downgrade diplomatic relations with Tehran, expand targeted sanctions against senior political and security officials and their networks, and pursue IRGC designation through available legal pathways and equivalent enforcement tools.
The protests that began in December 2025 are not about prices alone. They represent a sustained challenge to a political system widely perceived as irreparable. Recognising that reality is not radicalism. For Europe, it is strategic realism.
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Dr. Babak RezaeeDaryakenari is an associate professor in the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University, specialising in geopolitics and political power.
Dr. Babak RezaeeDaryakenari is an associate professor in the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University, specialising in geopolitics and political power.