This is the surest sign yet that ordinary Iranians want to rejoin the wider world

Protesters marching against the regime in Tehran earlier this week (Image: AP)

There are protests in Iran again, as there were in 2019, 2022 and 2023. But there is something fundamentally different this time. These demonstrations are no longer only about what Iranians reject. For the first time in decades, they are openly about what they want — and what they want is the return of the monarchy.

On the streets, crowds chant “Javid Shah” — the Persian equivalent of “God Save the King” – and “Pahlavi barmigardeh”, meaning the son of the late Shah, the Crown Prince, is “returning”. For many Iranians, monarchy is no longer just one political option among many. It has become shorthand for a return to normal life: normal relations with the UK, the United States and Israel; an end to the arrest of British nationals simply for holding a British passport; women free to choose whether to wear the hijab; and a country no longer ruled by Islamist ideology.

Above all, Iranians want to rejoin the world. They remember – or have been told by their parents – that before the 1979 revolution, Iran was a country looking outward, not one isolated, sanctioned and permanently at odds with the West.

Yet it is important to remember how Iran ended up here. The disaster that followed the revolution was the product of what the Shah himself once called the “unholy alliance of Islamists and leftists”. Secular, atheist communists aligned themselves with political Islam because they fundamentally misunderstood it – a mistake parts of the modern Western left continue to make today. They focus obsessively on Islamism’s “anti-imperialist” rhetoric while ignoring its own deeply imperialist ambitions. One Western intellectual, however, saw the danger clearly: Sir Roger Scruton.

It is rare that I cry while reading yet one essay still moves me every time I return to his 1984 article in The Times, “In Memory of Iran”. Scruton opens with a devastating question: “Who remembers Iran?” He asks what became of the students, journalists and intellectuals who once demanded the Shah’s overthrow – and what they forgot in the process. 

They forgot, he wrote, “the Shah’s real achievements: his successes in combating illiteracy, backwardness and powerlessness; the reforms which might have saved his people from the tyranny of evil mullahs, had he been given the chance to accomplish them”.

Those “evil mullahs” are still in power. My family is still in Iran. During the last wave of mass protests, the regime shut down the internet entirely. I do not know when I will next be able to speak to my mother on a video call. Yet, despite this, I am hopeful.

Unlike much of the Western media, Iranians themselves have largely abandoned the illusion that the regime can be reformed from within. Increasingly, they are saying so openly. They want a clean break with the Islamic Republic.

Is there real hope for change? I believe there is. This movement is no longer driven by elites or intellectuals alone. It is a bottom-up revolt, spreading even through the most traditionally conservative parts of society – the bazaar, Iran’s commercial heart. Business owners understand what politicians refuse to admit: there is no future for trade, prosperity or dignity in an isolated Iran.

That is what makes this moment different. For the first time, Iranians are united not just in anger, but in purpose. And that is why, at last, the winds of change may truly be blowing.

• Mani Basharzad is Iranian born and lived in Iran for 19 years. He is now is a junior research associate at institute of economic affairs and Asia Freedom fellow at London School of Economics