Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has stepped into a swelling wave of protests in Iran, calling for more demonstrations as the unrest challenges the Islamic Republic. The Associated Press reported that his calls were rebroadcast by Farsi-language satellite news channels and websites abroad, and protesters returned to the streets Friday night after the protests had surged earlier.
The AP said the demonstrations were initially sparked by the Islamic Republic’s ailing economy but later grew into a wider challenge to the theocracy. It also linked the anger and momentum to years of nationwide protest activity and to a 12-day war in June involving Israel’s assault and U.S. action against nuclear enrichment sites.
How much support Pahlavi truly has inside Iran remains unclear, the AP reported. The AP described uncertainty over whether protesters want a return of the Peacock Throne associated with the Shah’s monarchy or whether they are primarily seeking something other than Iran’s Shiite theocracy.
Pahlavi, who the AP described as 65-year-old and in exile in the United States, successfully prompted protesters onto the streets Thursday night, according to the report. The AP said he then issued calls for Iranians to return Friday night and later urged more demonstrations this weekend.
Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert with the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, discussed the political character of the movement in remarks included in the AP story. “Over the past decade, Iran’s protest movement and dissident community have been increasingly nationalist in tone and tenor,” Taleblu said. He added that “The more the Islamic Republic has failed, the more it has emboldened its antithesis,” and said Pahlavi’s effort worked by 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.”
The AP also reported that Pahlavi’s profile has risen at various times in foreign politics, including during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term. It said Trump and other leaders have been hesitant to embrace him, citing cautionary tales from the Middle East and elsewhere about Western governments placing faith in exiles long estranged from their homelands.
Iranian state media, which has for years mocked Pahlavi as out of touch and corrupt, blamed Thursday night’s demonstrations on “monarchist terrorist elements.” The AP said that during the unrest, vehicles were burned and police kiosks were attacked.
Born Oct. 31, 1960, Pahlavi is the son of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the AP said he lived much of his early life in the luxury of the crown prince role. It said Mohammad Reza’s rule was cemented by a 1953 CIA-backed coup and that he cooperated closely with the Americans, who sold the autocratic ruler billions of dollars in weapons and spied on the Soviet Union from Iran.
The AP traced the monarchy’s collapse to the late 1970s, describing how protests against the Shah drew multiple factions and how the crisis culminated in the Shah’s departure amid his terminal cancer. It said Crown Prince Reza left Iran in 1978 for flight training at a U.S. air base in Texas, and that a year later his father fled during the Islamic Revolution that ultimately established a new theocratic government and executed thousands, according to the report.
After his father’s death, the AP reported that a royal court in exile announced that Pahlavi assumed the role of the shah on Oct. 31, 1980, his 20th birthday. In the speech quoted by the AP, he told Iranians, “I can understand and sympathize with your sufferings and your inner torment,” and that he “shed the tears which you must hide,” adding that “Yet there is, I am sure, light beyond the darkness.”
The AP said Pahlavi has spent nearly five decades in exile and has sought influence abroad, including through efforts such as a clandestine broadcast reported by The Washington Post in 1986. The AP said the Washington Post reported the CIA supplied Pahlavi’s allies “a miniaturized television transmitter for an 11-minute clandestine broadcast” to Iran that pirated the signal of two stations, and that the broadcast included Pahlavi’s reported message: “I will return and together we will pave the way for the nation’s happiness and prosperity through freedom.”
In more recent years, the AP said Pahlavi has used social media videos and that Farsi-language news outlets such as Iran International have highlighted his calls. It quoted Mahmood Enayat, general manager of Iran International’s owner Volant Media, saying the channel ran Pahlavi’s ad and others “on a pro bono basis” as “part of our mission to support Iran’s civil society.”
The AP also included past remarks by Pahlavi about the Islamic Republic’s reform prospects, including a 2017 interview in which he told The Associated Press, “This regime is simply irreformable because the nature of it, its DNA, is such that it cannot,” and that people had given up with the idea of reform. It further reported criticism of his engagement with Israel, noting that he traveled there in 2023 and met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In the report’s account of Pahlavi’s diplomacy, it quoted him from 2017 describing his focus on liberating Iran and seeking help from any party willing, saying, “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.”