The female wing of Pavilion 209 of the Evin prison, in Tehran, is the place where many rights defenders of Iranian women fulfill their penalty. Last Monday, Israeli war planes bombed the prison and seriously damaged that pavilion and other prison units, according to testimonies transmitted to support the feminist movements in the Middle East and Asia. Israeli officials boasted of hitting a “symbol of tyranny”. What they did not say is that the victims of that bombing, according to the cited testimonies, were, paradoxically, some of the Iranians imprisoned for opposing the regime with which Israel claims to want to end.
The bombardment of that prison – where activists had been imprisoned that participated in the demonstrations of 2022 after death at the hands of the young Yina Mahsa Amini police for carrying the veil poorly placed – is only one against Iran, between June 13 and 25. More transcendent for Tehran authorities were, surely, other attacks: those who murdered prominent scientists, destroyed or damaged their nuclear facilities and eliminated the chiefs of the Iranian armies – regular and parallel and more powerful: the revolutionary guard.
The Iranian regime has fitted those blows without succumbing, when it was already in low hours. Militarily – by the Israeli attacks of 2024 -; and economically, for the depauperation of its population and international sanctions against its nuclear program. As demonstrated by the demonstrations of 2022 and those that had happened in previous years, the Islamic Utopia project that governs will have been losing since then the favor of many Iranians.
Some reasons that explain the resistance, despite all this, of the political system founded by the charismatic Ruhollah Jomeini are obvious; others, not so much. Among the first, the repression that unleashes the regime against its “greatest threat”: the “common and currents Iranians”, as the neuroscientist and human rights activist Mahmood Amiry-Moghadam stands out by telephone.
Among the second motifs, the least obvious, are the ideological or mere reasons of the Iranians who, either support it because they depend economically on it to survive. These last include those who benefit from clientele mechanisms that loyalty to members of the most disadvantaged classes offering them economic advantages.
On the survival of this regime and corruption that indicate numerous studies, they depend in turn huge privileges and great fortunes. The latter is the case of one of the great beneficiaries of that corruption in Iran: the body of the revolutionary guard.
The continuity of the Islamic regime of Iran was also possible in the past for its particular institutional architecture, which includes elected republican institutions, such as Parliament or the position of president chosen by universal direct suffrage. Although these institutions are subject to other authoritarian cuts that invalidate their democratic character – for example, by exercising a prior screening of candidates for political positions – that hybrid design allowed, at least in the first decades of the current Iranian political system, the Iranians would access some political participation. That was an escape valve for the desire for change.
Far from the times in which the so -called reformists – who believed that the Islamic Republic could change from within – controlled Parliament and Presidency, those mechanisms of limited political participation of the Iranian population have less and less weight and less credibility. The authorities continue, however, trying to take advantage of them. In 2024, at another time of difficulty – the Islamic regime allowed a relatively moderate candidate ,. Fishshkian won at the polls by stirring the fear of even greater radicalization of the regime.
Representation
Mahmood Amiry-Moghadam directs the NGO Iran Human Rights (IHR), which documents the application of the death penalty in Iran. This activist points to a rule in that country: “The weaker the regime is, the more repression displays.” Now, it emphasizes, when the authorities have been “unable to defend” the country of a foreign military aggression, about 900 people accused of spying for Israel has been arrested. Six men have been hanged.
in the use of repression as a social control tool in Iran. “It has an impact on the whole society that goes beyond causing fear,” says the director of IHR, because “it generates a sensation that in psychology is known as the helpless learned, for which people feel helpless to change their situation.” That feeling becomes a “social chronic depression”, for which citizens believe that “they cannot do anything” to change the system. That is, for this neuroscientist, one of the “keys to the survival of the Islamic Republic.”
Naysan Rafati, the main analyst for Iran of the International Crisis Crisis Center Group, agrees to attribute “in part” the survival of that regime to “the repressive capacity he has maintained and deployed against dissent.” This analyst then points to another factor: the popular support base, the “central group of supporters that support” the system, either “by ideological conviction or for personal benefit.”
That hard core of supporters can constitute, calculates Amiry-Moghaddam, between “25% and 30% of the population.” Among them, he considers, the genuine supporters of the system “are much less” than those who support it for interest.
The experts stand out among these interested supports: that of the Revolutionary Guard, the parallel army whose mission is to defend the country but the Islamic regime, and which, as such, is its main armed arm to repress the protest manifestations. The current supreme leader, Ayatolá Alí Jameneí, in office since 1989, not only prevented this body leadership, which was initially questioned. In expression of the Iranian historian Ali Ansari, the revolutionary guard has thus becoming an “economic empire” with weapons. Also with an obvious interest in which the Islamic Republic survives.
A militia that depends on that parallel army, the Basij, is also vital to crush any change of change. Not only does the repression of the demonstrations, or of the women who have dispensed with the veil as a sample of rejection of the regime. It is also one of the pillars of an intricate state and parastatal network of educational, cultural organizations – or indoctrination – and charity, which guarantees adherence to the regime to Iranians of the most disadvantaged social layers through the concession of prebendas.
The Basij militia is, above all, a mass organization. It has up to one million members who participate in groups of students, teachers, lawyers, journalists and athletes, or the so -called “righteous circles” where affiliates are indoctrine in the most reactionary Islamic values and in support of the country’s political system, often in the same mosques.
These affiliates preferently access scholarships, university, public employment and housing, and have a medical service and a network of economics. The organization has thus become “a mattress between the clerical regime and the people” and constitutes another “of the reasons for the survival” of the Islamic Republic, he said in an interview with this newspaper in 2022 Iranian political scientist Saeid Gickar.
Without these clientele mechanisms, many Iranians could not subsist. In January 2023, the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare of the country disclosed a report in which the percentage of Iranians plunged into extreme poverty rose to a third of the population. The authorities blame that misery for that of the country that Israel and the United States have tried to destroy. That tide of new poor people coexists
