Analysts cite nationalist shift in protest sentiment
“Over the past decade, Iran’s protest movement and dissident community have been increasingly nationalist in tone and tenor,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert with the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which faces sanctions from Tehran. “The more the Islamic Republic has failed, the more it has emboldened its antithesis.”
Taleblu said Pahlavi’s effort had succeeded in framing a contrast between the Islamic Republic’s present and a possible future. “The success of the crown prince and his team has been in drawing a sharp contrast between the normalcy of what was and the promise of what could be, versus the nightmare and present predicament that is the reality for so many Iranians,” he said.
Pahlavi’s profile previously rose during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term. Still, Trump and other world leaders have been hesitant to embrace him, given cautionary examples of Western governments backing exiles long estranged from their homelands, according to the AP.
A gilded past, a long exile
Pahlavi was born Oct. 31, 1960, into the royal household of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. His father’s rule was cemented partly by a 1953 CIA-backed coup; the Americans sold the autocratic shah billions of dollars of weapons. The shah’s feared SAVAK intelligence agency became notorious for the torture of dissidents.
Millions joined protests against the shah in the late 1970s, uniting secular leftists, labor unions, professionals, students and Muslim clergy. In 1978, Crown Prince Reza left for flight school at a U.S. air base in Texas. His father fled Iran the following year as the Islamic Revolution took hold. Shiite clerics consolidated power, establishing a theocratic government that executed thousands after the revolution and remains one of the world’s leading executioners, the AP reported.
After his father’s death, a royal court in exile announced that Reza Pahlavi assumed the role of the shah on Oct. 31, 1980, his 20th birthday.
Decades of exile, uncertain standing at home
What followed was nearly five decades abroad. The Washington Post reported in 1986 that the CIA supplied Pahlavi’s allies “a miniaturized television transmitter” for a clandestine broadcast to Iran. He has largely lived in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
His efforts to build support have faced persistent obstacles: bitter memories of his father’s rule; the perception that he is out of touch with modern Iran; and repression inside the country that aims to silence opposition sentiment. Younger Iranians who grew up under the Islamic Republic have no lived experience of the monarchy.
Pahlavi has used social media and Farsi-language news channels to maintain a public profile. Iran International, whose owner is Volant Media, broadcast his calls for protest and aired QR codes directed at security force members inside Iran who want to cooperate with him. Mahmood Enayat, the channel’s general manager, said it ran Pahlavi’s ad and others “on a pro bono basis” as “part of our mission to support Iran’s civil society.”
Governance questions and contested alliances
In recent years, Pahlavi has raised the possibility of a constitutional monarchy, perhaps with an elected rather than a hereditary ruler, and has said that the form of any future government is ultimately for Iranians to decide. “This regime is simply irreformable because the nature of it, its DNA, is such that it cannot,” Pahlavi told the Associated Press in 2017.
His 2023 trip to Israel, where he met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has drawn criticism, particularly following the June war. “My focus right now is on liberating Iran, and I will find any means that I can, without compromising the national interests and independence, with anyone who is willing to give us a hand, whether it is the U.S. or the Saudis or the Israelis or whomever it is,” he told the AP in 2017.