Hundreds of people staged a vocal protest at Tehran’s iconic Grand Bazaar on Sunday, in an unusual strike occurring amid a financial crisis and a moment of vulnerability for the theocratic regime.
The strike in the bazaar was over soaring inflation and power shortages, and it triggered protests in other commercial hubs in the capital, the anti-government Iran International news site reported.
The outbreak of protests at the Grand Bazaar, a sprawling centre of commerce, is symbolically significant because it was a focus of the protests of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which installed in power the current regime, then led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, after it toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Goldie Ghamari, a 38-year-old Iran-born Canadian politician whose family fled Iran due to persecution by the Islamist government, said on X that the Grand Bazaar strikes are “dramatic” and among the most significant acts of protest against the regime in her lifetime.
“It's the economic hub of the regime basically, and if it shuts down that’s going to have a significant impact on the regime overall, just like in 1979 one of the tipping points was the bazaar getting involved,” she said. Over the past year, more than 8,000 protests have taken place across Iran, she said, "most of them under the radar of international media."
The protests at the bazaar are driven by economic issues, Iran International and other sources reported, and directly connected to the dramatic depreciation of the rial against the U.S. dollar and Iran’s inflation rate of 35%. Last week, the rial plummeted to 820,500 per dollar on the unofficial market.
Donald Trump’s election to president in November added to Iran’s economic woes. The rial has depreciated by about 18% since then.
Trump’s second term in office may exacerbate Iran’s geopolitical vulnerability. Trump applied what he called “maximum pressure” on Iran during his first term in office in 2017-2020. People in his campaign said Iran had tried to assassinate him during the recent presidential race.
In addition, Iran’s regional standing has suffered major setbacks since in October 2023, two of its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, touched off a war with Israel that has severely weakened them.
The regime of Bashar Assad, a key Iranian ally, fell in Syria this month. Hezbollah, its offensive capabilities crushed by Israel, last month agreed to a ceasefire whose terms obligate it to leave Southern Lebanon. Hamas has lost its offensive capacity in Gaza and Iran itself lost crucial air defense capabilities in an Israel retaliatory strike on Oct. 26.
Additionally, Iran is facing internal protests over its regime's religious coercion, most recently in proposed legislation designed to deter women from defying the Islamic dress code imposed on them by the theocratic regime.
The bill, which has prompted a slew of condemnations of Iran in Western societies, prescribes fines, dismissals, lashings and imprisonment for defiant women and their supporters, and mandates the death penalty for certain modesty-related offenses.
The proposed legislation comes in response to waves of protests in Iran that resumed in 2022 following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini after she was detained for allegedly violating the Islamic dress code.
Johnny Nash, a British-Iranian human resources professional who hosts a popular podcast on Iran, titled Successful Iranians, said on X on Sunday that he expected the economic protest on display and the Grand Bazaar to merge with the one over religious coercion, possibly having far-reaching consequences for the regime.
“Mahsa Amini sparked the revolution, and it’s something we keep hearing in Iran and in the Diaspora,” he said on X. “But the Bazaar strike could be where that protest finds momentum because of the economic depreciation. And it’s all taking place at a moment of great vulnerability for the regime, ahead of a hostile Trump administration and after the smashing of its ring-of-fire doctrine,” he added, referencing the proxies Iran has propped up around Israel and its other regional foes, chiefly Saudi Arabia.
But the unrest does not appear to have a leader that is widely associated with it, "without which a revolution cannot succeed," Nash said. He added that many Iranians support Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the late Shah.
Reza Pahlavi, who has often called on X for Iranians to topple the regime, has not immediately commented on that platform about the Grand Bazaar strike.
