Cartoon by Mohsen Izadi

Confronting Iran Protests, Regime Uses Brute Force but Secretly Appeals to Moderates

By Benoit Faucon and David S. Cloud

The Wall Street Journal: As antigovernment protests swept across Iran last month, its top leaders made a secret appeal to two of the Islamic Republic’s founding families, the moderate Rafsanjani and Khomeini clans that hard-liners had pushed out of power, said people familiar with the talks.

Iran’s national-security chief, Ali Shamkhani, asked representatives of the families to speak out publicly to calm the unrest. If that happened, he said, liberalizing measures sought by demonstrators could follow, the people said.

The families refused, the people said.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his inner circle face a quandary after two months of nationwide protests. Their purges of prominent rivals and reformists from the government in recent years have narrowed their options for putting down one of the most serious internal challenges to their rule in the clerical regime’s 43-year history.

Support for the protests has been fueled by anger at an economy racked by sanctions and inflation, at laws requiring women to cover their heads in public, and at a government that has excluded moderates from its ranks, senior Iranian reformists have said. Moderates were once an integral part of Iran’s Islamic system of governance, and are now growing more aligned with protesters’ calls for the system to be torn down.

“A large part of society shares the dissatisfaction with the protesters,” Mohammad Khatami, a former president of Iran, warned this week in a speech released on a reformist social-media site. “Continuation of the status quo is further increasing the grounds for a societal collapse.”

The Iranian government didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The presence of moderates and reformists in the government once provided a political pressure-release valve, but both factions have seen their role in Iranian politics shrink in recent years. Reformist politicians have sought for decades to loosen Mr. Khamenei’s hard-line grip on Iranian society, while moderates accepted his role but favored more social and political freedoms. Their dissenting voices could help absorb discontent without proving to be a threat to the system.

In recent years, the Guardian Council—a 12-member body of clerics and jurists partly appointed by Mr. Khamenei with sweeping powers to veto legislation and decide who is eligible to run for office—has purged the government and Parliament of almost all moderates and reformists, and even some conservative rivals.

Before the 2021 presidential elections won by Ebrahim Raisi, the council approved five conservatives, one centrist and one reformist, and disqualified four others. “We narrowed the competition day by day, and trusted political activists of the people gradually left the scene,” Majid Ansari, a former vice president under former centrist President Hassan Rouhani, said this month at a forum in Tehran.

“Ayatollah Khamenei made sure all reformists left the political system,” said Saeid Golkar, an authority on Iran’s security services who teaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “He did political surgery to prepare for his succession.”

The protests erupted in September after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody, after she was arrested for allegedly violating strict laws on women’s dress in public. What began as nightly clashes in Tehran and other cities involving hundreds of mostly young people has given way to daily civil disobedience >>>