Moderate insiders in Tehran are warning that the public’s alienation may have deprived the system of the very vehicle it once relied on to manage public anger.
For years, reformists and centrist pragmatists served as a pressure valve — urging participation, tempering public frustration, and giving voters the sense that gradual change was still possible.
But since the record-low turnout of 2024, when even many who voted for Masoud Pezeshkian described it as the last time they would give moderates a chance, their ability to channel discontent appears to have evaporated.
Moderates privately concede they cannot mobilize their base, cannot convert anger into engagement, and cannot claim any mandate to shape policy.
Leading moderate daily Arman Melli wrote on Monday that factions and political parties have offered very little to solve the country’s problems.
Conservative factions, it argued, “have offered no progressive discourse,” while reformist groups “have not changed their rhetoric since 1997” and remain “unattractive to the new generation.”
‘Not cutting through’
Saeed Hajjarian, once the moderates’ foremost theoretician and strategist, has diagnosed the same problem in even starker terms.
“Even the very few ideas put forward by reformists are not picked up by the elite, let alone finding their way into public dialogue,” he said last week, branding the situation tragicomic.
Iran is navigating simultaneous crises—economic freefall, deep factional feuds and lingering insecurity after a June war with Israel and the United States—without any credible political structure capable of absorbing or redirecting the public mood.
Pezeshkian cannot rely on party machinery that barely exists. Conservatives cannot mobilize a constituency they never cultivated and the generation that came of age after 2009 sees no reason to engage with institutions it views as irrelevant.
Deeper roots
The erosion of political parties was not accidental. The old Persian motto “politics is a bastard” endured because it reflected lived experience.
For more than seven decades, successive rulers have treated organized politics as a threat to be contained.
After the 1953 coup, thousands of activists in the Tudeh Party and National Front were jailed, teaching a generation that political engagement offered more peril than promise.
The Islamic Republic intensified this dynamic: the execution of thousands of leftists in the 1980s, followed by show trials in 2009, cemented the view that activism brings risk without protection.
These waves of repression produced what the state wanted: fragmented citizens, hollow parties, and political actors more responsive to power than to society.
Reformists were the exception—tolerated not because they posed a challenge but because they helped to manage one. For two decades they served as a controlled outlet for public frustration, a way to delay rupture rather than resolve it.
Now even that exception is failing, and moderates themselves are the first to sound the alarm.