The latest Iranian protests are different

The latest Iranian protests are different:

"Insofar as one can distil the angry message of the protesters who have taken to the streets across Iran over the past ten days, it is a demand for freer lives and the chance of a decent livelihood. Threatened by theocratic judges with being declared “mohareb”, guilty of the capital offence of “waging war on God”, these young Iranians are taking huge risks, in the biggest eruption of discontent since the clergy-dominated regime put down mass protests against election-rigging in 2009. One of the many paradoxes of the Islamic Republic is that, while appointed theocrats and their enforcers — principally the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — are the lords of Iran’s labyrinthine politics, the vitality of its republican institutions and fiercely contested elections keeps springing surprises. And when the reformers Iranians elected fail to perform, this energy, propelled by that half of the 80m population under 30, spills into the streets. Hassan Rouhani, the reformist-backed moderate re-elected president last year in the teeth of hardline opposition, gets this — even if he is a target of the protests as well as the conservatives. Four decades after the 1979 revolution, the young are fed up with being dictated to by aged reactionaries hiding behind a fossilised ideology that has kept Iran isolated from the world."



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