Of
Greta Privitera
Khamenei’s guards fire on the crowd and arrest dozens of demonstrators, united by the slogan: “Don’t be afraid, we are all together”
He waited until ten in the morning. «What if this time there were only a few of us?», asked Amir, Ghazaleh’s brother, before crossing the threshold of the house. He works as a clerk at a shoemaker’s Gran Bazar in Tehran and for the third day in a row he participated in the traders’ strike which since yesterday has also become that of students and ordinary people. Once on the street, the fear vanished: “There were thousands of them.” Ghazaleh tells it, having arrived in Europe a week ago to escape the repression of the ayatollahs and who is now watching from a smartphone screen as her country rises up without her.
If you protest against inflation at historic highs, at 42.2 percent, against the collapse of the currency, against the high cost of living. «We never eat meat, we can’t afford to look after our children. My salary is worth a third less than last year”, says Laleh, an employee from Tehran. A disastrous economic picture due to the mismanagement of the country, the sanctions and policies that keep the economy sealed. And then to the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to throttle sales of Iranian oil abroad and the 12-day war with Israel, which forced the Islamic Republic to draw on Tehran’s already half-empty banks.
Not surprisingly, the head of the central bank, Mohammad Reza Farzin, resigned on Monday.
The government of the so-called reformist president is struggling. Masoud Pezeshkian meets the unions, the corporations, promises measures, seeks conciliatory words: «People’s livelihood is my daily concern: we are thinking about reforming the monetary and banking system».
His deputy, Mohammad Jafar Ghaempanah, apologizes to the citizens, but it is too late. When the “bazaars”, the traders, take to the streets, it means that there is collapse, they explain from Tehran. Protests are held in Shiraz, Isfahan, Kermanshah, Mashhad, Ahvaz, Yazd, Karaj, Malard, Pardis, Hamedan, Qeshm, Zanjan, and Tabriz. The walls of universities tremble with the cry of “azadi, azadi”, freedom.
On the streets that “death to the dictator” reappears, as in 2023, when girls without headscarves were at the head of the protests who, from that moment on, have never put it back. This time, however, the marches are led “by people without shoes”, by the poorest, they tell us. But the girls and their peers march alongside and face Ali Khamenei’s guards who beat, throw tear gas and arrest, especially in universities. In some videos, officers shoot into the crowd.
The air is tense and the authorities announce schools and offices closed in 24 provinces. The Attorney General of the Islamic Republic, Mohammad Movahedi Azad, repeats that the regime will demonstrate «firmness against any attempt to transform the demonstrations into an instrument of instabilityinsecurity and destruction of public property, through a lawful and decisive response.”
But it’s there a new slogan which had never been heard before: «Don’t be afraiddon’t be afraid, we are all in this together.”
December 31, 2025
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
