During the protests, thousands of Iranians were shot dead. Does that mean it would be a good thing if the United States were to launch a military attack on Iran? The protests in Iran, fuelled by anger over rising prices, began in late 2025 and reached a peak on 8 and 9 January, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across the country. The security forces responded with unprecedented violence. Human rights organisations estimate that more than 50,000 people were arrested and that 33,000 or more were killed. The regime carries out executions on a daily basis. The opinion piece was originally published in De Tijd (In Dutch).
The protests are not the first to have been crushed by the Islamic regime through harsh repression. Following electoral fraud in 2009, millions of Iranians demanded fair elections through the Green Movement. The colour green referred to the campaign of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi and symbolised hope and resistance to the rule of then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Since then, Iran has experienced numerous waves of protest. The most prominent was that of 2022–2023, which, under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom”, sought to overthrow the regime by rejecting one of its central pillars: the mandatory hijab. Female demonstrators removed their headscarves en masse and set them alight. In several provinces, pluralistic slogans were also chanted, backed by Iranians from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds. Those protests, too, were bloodily suppressed by the security forces.
A process of democratisation
As with previous protests, there is no visible domestic resistance organisation behind the most recent demonstrations. There are no leaders taking the lead. Only political prisoners, such as Nobel Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, and Nasrin Sotoudeh, who has received an honorary doctorate from KU Leuven, have publicly voiced support for the protests.
This creates the impression that the country is unfamiliar with the very concept of democracy. Yet Iran experienced a process of democratisation as early as the beginning of the 20th century. It was not encouraged by the West, but by the Russian Revolution of 1905. The Constitutional Revolution — again without a clear opposition leader — resulted in a constitutional monarchy that set in motion a process of democratisation at a time when only a handful of European countries had universal suffrage. That process came to an end largely as a result of foreign interference.
Just as today, Iran was then grappling not only with building a democracy but also with safeguarding its sovereignty. Iranians have a long history of both domestic corruption and mismanagement and foreign interference, from countries such as the United Kingdom, Russia and the United States. These factors largely explain the repression carried out by the Islamic regime since 1979. The regime is not only corrupt and incompetent; the country has also endured decades of Western economic sanctions.
In 2017, just before US President Donald Trump tore up the nuclear deal with Tehran, trade between the European Union and Iran had tripled. When the US formally withdrew from the agreement in May 2018, it reimposed all economic sanctions, including secondary sanctions against companies doing business with Iran. The combination of currency depreciation, inflation and financial restrictions has reduced households’ purchasing power and placed severe strain on Iran’s healthcare system.
Human rights organisations and UN officials have warned for years that the sanctions violate the right to health of millions of Iranians. As a result, many Iranians have been impoverished. They are engaged in a daily struggle to put food on the table, with little room left to contribute to a process of democratisation.
“The Iranians have never supported foreign interference”
On 20 January, the US Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, stated that “maximum pressure on Iran has worked”. “In December, its economy collapsed. We saw a major bank fail. The central bank has begun printing money. There is a shortage of dollars. They can no longer obtain imported goods and that is why people have taken to the streets,” Bessent said. Yet the sanctions have not weakened the grip of the Islamic regime. Nor has the opposition been sufficiently supported to remove it from power.
The enemy of my enemy
Iranians have never been in favour of foreign interference, but decades of struggle have left them exhausted and desperate. As a result, some are receptive to promises of intervention by the US and Israel — precisely the two state enemies. For some Iranians, the proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” appears to apply.
How much support there is for such military intervention remains unclear. In any case, interference is only desired insofar as it would topple the regime. Some Western politicians make it seem as though military intervention would be a quick fix to end the oppression of the Iranian people. But no one knows how many civilian casualties would result, to what extent the country’s basic infrastructure would be destroyed, how long such military escalation would last, or how widely it would spread. Iranians are well aware of the devastation wrought by Western interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya.
On Saturday, Trump described regime change as “the best option”. But even in a scenario such as the removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, we do not know who would ultimately take power or what democratic guarantees the Iranian population could rely on. The US also assumes that the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, would concede defeat in the face of overwhelming military force. Yet the regime would fight to the bitter end to survive.
Iran has been striving for democratisation for 150 years. Alongside a strong civil society, it has one of the most remarkable women’s movements in the world. An inclusive, pluralistic discourse also exists among Iranians. Despite everything, there remains hope for the country.