Iran’s Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi Has Develop into Indispensable to the Nation’s Opposition

Reza Pahlavi was born in a time of tumult. His father, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, stood at one of the crucial traumatic junctures of his lengthy reign, which started in 1941. Within the 5 years earlier than and after his son’s start on Oct. 31, 1960, the Shah remarried—pushed by dynastic nervousness and the pressing want for a crown prince—whereas confronting mounting financial pressures and accelerating social change. He was on the cusp of launching the White Revolution, a program of reforms that will irreversibly alter the material of Iranian society: land redistribution, girls’s enfranchisement, academic growth, and the systematic weakening of conventional hierarchies.

Opposition to those adjustments—particularly land reform and the political empowerment of girls—coalesced round a hitherto obscure cleric, Ruhollah Khomeini, who mobilized road violence and non secular populism to problem the reforms. It was on this cauldron of expectation and anxieties that the Shah’s new spouse, Queen Farah, gave start to a son. They named him Reza and virtually instantly anointed him crown prince.

Opposition to those adjustments—particularly land reform and the political empowerment of girls—coalesced round a hitherto obscure cleric, Ruhollah Khomeini, who mobilized road violence and non secular populism to problem the reforms. It was on this cauldron of expectation and anxieties that the Shah’s new spouse, Queen Farah, gave start to a son. They named him Reza and virtually instantly anointed him crown prince.

Lower than 20 years later, that very same cleric would overthrow the monarchy and erect an absolutist theocracy as an alternative. However historical past, with its occasional macabre ironies, was not completed. With the Islamic Republic now dealing with an unprecedented menace to its continued existence, within the type of a broad-based nationwide protest motion, Reza has emerged as essentially the most broadly embraced image of its political future.

Some dismiss Reza’s rising recognition as mere nostalgia. It may simply as plausibly be learn as defiance among the many younger—a cosmopolitan, digitally fluent technology livid on the tragic selections imposed on them by historical past—and primary regret amongst older Iranians.

When his father died in exile in Egypt, Reza started what has now change into a decades-long odyssey. He had choices, however he selected the street much less traveled. Like sure scions of fallen dynasties, he may have chosen a lifetime of cultivated leisure—or worse, of parasitic frivolity. He may have monetized his royal standing by way of superstar, spectacle, or entrepreneurial accumulation.

He selected none of those. As a substitute, he launched into an virtually Sisyphean job: to cohere a fractured, despairing, and deeply divided Iranian diaspora into one thing resembling a political coalition.

Alongside this arduous street, he initially sought counsel not from courtiers however from seasoned males of letters and politics—figures equivalent to Ahmad Ghoreishi, as soon as a college rector, and Hormoz Hekmat, one of many singular intellectuals of his technology. He reached throughout ideological divides, in search of allies from monarchists, liberals, nationalists, social democrats, and secular leftists alike. On the time, the aim was to muster all forces right into a unified voice to take the message of the Iranian folks and information of their struggles to the world.

Primarily based in Washington and Paris, he traveled broadly and gave talks in small or large gatherings of Iranians of all backgrounds. He was seen as a unifier. His small workplace on the time appeared merely a middle for organizing his conferences. There have been completely different organizations with completely different and generally differing allegiances that claimed to be near him—every harboring their very own agendas. He courted all of them whereas additionally distancing himself from them. Often, he would emphatically declare that he didn’t help the usage of harsh phrases, and harsh techniques, in silencing those that may not absolutely help a royal restoration agenda. His radical supporters had been dismayed by these declarations, and his detractors nonetheless say he didn’t do sufficient to place an finish to such habits.

He endured derision from the clerical regime, together with Khomeini’s dismissive try to belittle him as a “mini-mini-Pahlavi.” But he stayed the course.

Because the failures of the Islamic Republic amassed—its dogmatic rigidity, financial incompetence, systemic corruption, and imperial adventurism—the political panorama started to shift. Within the final 20 years, the regime was more and more criticized at dwelling for being extra invested in underwriting repression overseas—spending tens of billions of {dollars} to maintain the Assad dictatorship or to arm proxies in Lebanon—than in addressing the fundamental wants of its personal folks. Because the regime steadily misplaced legitimacy, in demonstrations in Iran occasional shouts in favor of the crown prince’s grandfather—Reza Shah—started to be heard. These early slogans had been the primary populist show of a brand new revisionism concerning the Pahlavi period. Students had way back began this course of.

In opposition to this backdrop, Reza Pahlavi started to profit from a mirrored reassessment of his grandfather’s and father’s report: Reza Shah, who after a coup in 1921 inherited a failed state, and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who got here to energy in 1941 and by 1978 presided over one of many fastest-growing economies within the creating world.

The Pahlavi household holidays in St. Moritz, Switzerland, on Feb. 5, 1972, seven years earlier than their exile from Iran. Reza is second from left.Michel Ginfray/Sygma by way of Getty Pictures

Equally vital on this historic revisionism was the rising stature of the crown prince’s mom, Farah, whose dignity within the face of exile, bereavement, and relentless vilification acquired an virtually mythic high quality. She earned recognition as a patron of tradition and builder of establishments, spearheading packages for Iranian youngsters and assembling one of the crucial outstanding collections of recent artwork within the non-Western world: Picassos, Pollocks, Rothkos. As soon as derided as extravagances, these works—nonetheless hidden in museum basements in Tehran as “decadent” relics—at the moment are cherished every time displayed and valued at as a lot as $5 billion.

Collectively, the reassessment of the Pahlavi period and the lived disaster of clerical rule produced a generational reckoning. Three generations of Iranians have now lived below the Procrustean constraints of an anachronistic theocracy anchored in centuries-old values, ruled by an incestuous elite of aged ideologues and their rapacious offspring. Iran, in the meantime, stays a younger society, animated by assertive men and women unwilling to simply accept the established order.

These youthful generations, starting with the Inexperienced Revolution in 2009, mounted successive waves of protest in opposition to the Islamic regime. These culminated within the 2022 “Girl, Life, Freedom” motion. Reza was not a central determine in these protests, however he did reply to them, consciously surrounding himself with a youthful cohort of advisors, activists, and organizers—people formed much less by exile politics than by the lived realities and new ideologies.

Greater than as soon as, when requested what type of authorities he envisioned after the autumn, he would say the type of authorities have to be seen as secondary to the character of the regime. That have to be decided by the folks, however its essence have to be fashionable sovereignty, gender equality, and human rights.

From the outset of his democratic activism, Reza’s base of help was essentially heterogeneous and sometimes discordant. On one finish stood die-hard royalists, some advocating a restorationist imaginative and prescient anchored in dynastic authority. On the opposite had been secular democrats of assorted persuasions who noticed him not as a future monarch however as a unifying civic determine. Initially, the coalition’s goal was modest however important: to amplify the voices of Iranians demanding freedom, dignity, and accountable authorities.

As repression intensified in recent times and the demand for change hardened right into a name for regime change, Reza’s position advanced. Steadily—and never with out resistance—he got here to be seen as a determine able to cohering an enormous coalition inside and outdoors Iran to handle what many now regard because the inevitable collapse of clerical despotism.

He isn’t with out detractors. Some level to the militancy of a subset of his royalist supporters and to their insistence on ideological fealty; they see these as ominous portents. Others invoke the traumatic reminiscence of 1979 and warn of a replay of Khomeini’s bait-and-switch. Within the months earlier than coming to energy, in all his interviews, Khomeini promised a democratic republic modeled on the French Fifth Republic. As soon as he took Iran, he created a despotism akin to Jerome Savonarola’s short-lived theocracy in Renaissance Florence.

These considerations are usually not frivolous, however they don’t current a doomed state of affairs. Iran in the present day will not be the Iran of 1979. The sustained wrestle for democracy, the pluralism of opposition forces, and the prudence embedded within the Girl, Life, Freedom motion make a profitable dictatorial energy seize much less seemingly. Khomeini, furthermore, had a protracted and sordid report of explicitly anti-democratic concepts effectively earlier than the revolution, cynically masked solely in its remaining months. Despotism was not an accident of his rule; it was its animating precept.

Reza’s report factors in the wrong way. For almost 4 a long time, he has labored—usually frustratingly, generally ineffectively, however constantly—with others, subordinating private authority to coalition-building.

Reza Pahlavi speaks at a information convention in Paris on June 23, 2025, shortly after U.S. airstrikes destroyed Iran’s main nuclear amenities.Joel Saget/AFP by way of Getty Pictures

Reza’s repeated efforts to distance himself from such tendencies haven’t persuaded all critics. But a bigger variety of Iranians, in Iran and within the diaspora, have come to treat him as essentially the most credible unifying determine on the horizon. A ballot by Gamaan, a revered polling group primarily based within the Netherlands, places his help at a few third, with related numbers opposed or undecided. There isn’t any one else on the Iranian political panorama who’s even near this approval score.

Crucially, Reza has articulated—many times—that he doesn’t search energy for its personal sake. He has described his position as explicitly transitional: to assist shepherd Iran from the wreckage of the Islamic Republic towards a democratic, secular order whose remaining form will probably be decided not by him, or by any dynasty or faction, however by the freely expressed will of the Iranian folks. In a political tradition scarred by absolutism—monarchical and clerical alike—this insistence issues.

If Iran is certainly approaching a second of reckoning, it would require not a savior however a facilitator, not a redeemer however a determine able to trust-building throughout deep divides. In that slender however indispensable area, Reza has positioned himself not as Iran’s ruler however as its custodian for a passage between political eras. Ought to that second arrive, it’s more and more tough to think about a transition in Iran with out such a job for him.