After Iran’s massacres, tensions grow inside the regime

On the face of it, all is calm again. The regime has reasserted control. The ceiling of fear, briefly shattered, has been restored. Masked men enforce de facto martial law and a dusk-to-dawn curfew in the capital, Tehran. Security forces scour rooftops for Starlink’s telltale satellite dishes and raid firms suspected of backing the protests. Checkpoints dot the smaller cities where demonstrations first erupted. Parents pay the “bullet tax”—ransoms of thousands of dollars—to retrieve the bodies of their shot children.

The toll continues to rise. hrana, a Washington-based human-rights monitor, has verified more than 4,500 deaths and 26,000 arrests. People in Tehran, including officials, say the real death toll may approach 20,000. In 1989 China’s leaders survived mass protests by killing thousands near Tiananmen Square. Iran appears to have followed that script.

The Islamic Republic’s pecking order is so far unchanged. The elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, briefly described the first week of protests as legitimate. His caution has since been swept aside by the raw power of the theocracy and its enforcers. Ali Khamenei, supreme leader for 36 years, has accused protesters of sedition and defended killing them. The shah, his advisers believed, fell in 1979 for lack of resolve and because he fled. Mr Khamenei shows no sign of repeating that mistake.

Yet beneath the surface the system is shaken. Officials and hangers-on speak of “huge chatter” within the elite, says a frequent traveller in touch with people close to Iran’s leaders. “A line has been crossed. The status quo is unsustainable.” The clerics have drowned in their people’s blood, says a pistachio farmer who is close to some officials; they have dug their own graves. On the streets, shock is hardening into anger. Cries of “Death to Khamenei!” echo again—from funerals by day and rooftops by night. Inside and outside Iran, Iranians sketch out possible transitions.

Within the regime, much of the talk is about easing aside Mr Khamenei, now 86. Even before the killings, insiders complained about his intransigence in nuclear talks with America. By insisting on retaining a token enrichment programme, they argue, he squandered a deal in 2025 that might have lifted sanctions. “We expect the supreme leader to exit within three to 12 months,” says a stockmarket investor still operating in Iran, citing the ayatollah’s age and unpopularity. Others look abroad. “We used to worry we’d become Venezuela,” runs a joke in cafés frequented by civil servants. “Now we worry we won’t.”

Reformists still hope to invert the political hierarchy and shift power from the clergy to a secular presidency. One favours a constitutional figurehead; another would hive off the “Islamic” from the republic and salvage what remains of the state. “Slash funding for seminaries and their puppet mullahs,” says a seminary graduate, arguing that the savings might avert national bankruptcy. Most prefer a palace coup led by a strongman to one led by the weak president. Names suggested include Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, the parliament’s speaker and a former commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (irgc), and Ali Larijani, a veteran power-broker and son of an ayatollah, who now heads the Supreme National Security Council. Both have children who are living or have tried to live in North America.

Such is the level of fear, however, that no one will move without the security forces. The guards are believed still to number around 170,000 men; the regular army founded under the shah is about 400,000-strong. Claims that guards have been executed for refusing orders are unverified. Yet the irgc is no monolith. Its command structure was damaged by Israel’s war last summer. And some may choose self-preservation over fealty. “The irgc is loyal to Iran, not to Khamenei,” insists an official.

Dissidents, too, are preparing for the day after. For now, Reza Pahlavi, the former shah’s son, is the most visible figure. He has filled the void left by the regime’s repression at home and, to a lesser extent, by royalist intimidation in exile.

But his ambitions are challenged by a broad front of progressives who distrust a royalist promising to bring democracy. The front says it echoes the voices of Iran’s vibrant civil society that brought millions to the streets in 2009 to oppose a rigged election and forced the regime to relax the mandatory veil after the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests in 2022. It lacks a strong leader but is backed by teachers’ and truckers’ unions, students, women’s-rights activists and thousands of political prisoners, including Narges Mohammadi, a Nobel peace-prize winner jailed again last month.

Blueprints for change are in the offing. The Azadi network, a women-led collective launched in London by activists from the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, will soon release a 39-page “Democratic Transition Framework”. It proposes 100 days of international supervision, followed by monitored elections for a constitutional assembly that would appoint a seven-person leadership council. On January 18th 14 clerics and intellectuals issued a separate manifesto urging the regime to “stop suppressing and become more democratic”. At least one signatory called for Mr Khamenei to be tried for the recent killings.

Rivalries risk undoing the opposition even as the regime teeters. In a survey in 2024 by gamaan, a Dutch research group, 89% of respondents favoured democracy. But they disagree about its exact nature: 26% preferred a secular republic; 21% wanted to combine it with a monarchy; and 20% favoured an Islamic republic. Many support Mr Pahlavi because of his brand recognition. Others fear replacing one patriarch and despot with another. “If we don’t raise our voices, we’ll repeat the mistake of 1979, when we followed Khomeini and forfeited our dream of democracy,” says Parastou Frouhar, a veteran female dissident who travels between Germany and Iran.

For now, Mr Khamenei still calls the shots. He relies on a base of some 13m voters who backed a hardliner in the last election and cling to him like prayer beads on a thread. A broader constituency may yet prefer tyranny to chaos, hoping that limited concessions, such as an amnesty for political prisoners, may smooth a path to a gradual transition. Looming over all, however, is Donald Trump. A naval task force as big as the one assembled before last summer’s strike is nearing Iran’s shores. Better change from within, says a merchant with ties to the regime, than devastation imposed from without. ■