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Is Iran’s Regime About to Go the Way of Syria’s?
A series of perceived betrayals has shaken the clerical establishment’s “hard base.”
In 1979, when the Islamic Republic was established in Iran, the new clerical regime enjoyed broad popular support across Iranian society. It would gradually lose that base across the ensuing four decades. Now, as the Islamic revolution turns 46, new evidence indicates that even its last core supporters—an ultra-ideological constituency loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—are beginning to turn their backs on the system.
For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, questions are now arising as to whether members of the “hard base”—which make up the foot soldiers of the suppressive apparatus—will continue to defend the regime unquestioningly if unrest once again erupts. Such questions have already invoked panic across the senior oligarchy of the Islamic Republic, who know all too well that it was the demoralization and, ultimately, the abandonment of dictator Bashar al-Assad’s suppressive forces that resulted in the collapse of the Baathist regime in Syria.
In 1979, when the Islamic Republic was established in Iran, the new clerical regime enjoyed broad popular support across Iranian society. It would gradually lose that base across the ensuing four decades. Now, as the Islamic revolution turns 46, new evidence indicates that even its last core supporters—an ultra-ideological constituency loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—are beginning to turn their backs on the system.
For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, questions are now arising as to whether members of the “hard base”—which make up the foot soldiers of the suppressive apparatus—will continue to defend the regime unquestioningly if unrest once again erupts. Such questions have already invoked panic across the senior oligarchy of the Islamic Republic, who know all too well that it was the demoralization and, ultimately, the abandonment of dictator Bashar al-Assad’s suppressive forces that resulted in the collapse of the Baathist regime in Syria.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has relied on overlapping social constituencies for over four decades to maintain power. From broad-based support in 1979 to today’s dwindling hard base, Iran’s ruling clerical establishment has steadily lost the backing of nearly every class it once claimed to represent. Throughout the first decade of the revolution, the Islamic Republic slowly started to lose the modern social class in Iran because of the enforcement of its hard-line Islamist policies, spearheaded by then-Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini’s “Cultural Revolution” that sought to eradicate all modern, Western, and pre-Islamic influences from Iranian society. The outbreak of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War would also provide Khomeini with unprecedented wartime powers to eliminate the secular forces that helped topple the former Pahlavi monarchy.
Distinct changes in Iranian society would mark the second decade of the revolution. War weariness, coupled with Iran’s youth boom—with more than two-thirds of the Iranian population at the time under 30—would result in a new trend of secularization and liberalization across Iran’s middle classes. The regime’s subsequent violent crackdown on this trend, coupled with electoral rigging, would start to erode support from this constituency. This suppression reached new heights in 2009 following the engineered presidential vote and the suppression of subsequent protests, which resulted in the regime entirely losing support from the middle classes.
Bread-and-butter issues almost a decade later would, for the first time, result in the erosion of support from working-class, rural Iranians—what Khomeini had always referred to as the “downtrodden” class, and the traditional support base of the Islamic Republic. An inability to provide daily staples to poorer Iranians was spurred by government mismanagement, rampant state corruption, and economic hardship from international sanctions. The backlash would spill onto Iran’s streets in 2017 and 2019, which, for the first time, saw working-class Iranians in areas the regime considered strongholds—such as Qom and Mashhad—spearhead protests. The IRGC’s heavy-handed suppression of these protests, not least in 2019—which saw 1,500 people killed in just a few weeks—would be the final nail in the coffin, leading to the downtrodden class turning its back on the system for good.
From 2019 onward, as the revolution turned 40, the support base of the once broadly popular Islamic Republic became almost entirely reliant on a very narrow, hard-line ideological base. This social constituency—collectively known as the hard base (hasteyeh sakht)—supports the regime for hard-line Islamist ideological reasons. Its support is centered on the imposition of hard-line Islamist policies at home and abroad, which it regards as Islamist justice. These policies include ideological morality policing in Iran; support for the IRGC’s “axis of resistance” such as Hezbollah and Hamas; a commitment to eradicate Israel driven by antisemitism; vehement anti-Americanism; and the quest to develop nuclear weapons. In other words, the core ideological pillars of the Islamic revolution.
To further consolidate this hard base, the Islamic Republic has manufactured a “deep society” made up of this social constituency—a parallel “insider” society of the Islamic Republic within Iran’s broader population (known as “outsiders”), which keeps the state functioning and subsequently receives patronage. The ideological commitment of the constituency is exemplified by the fact that it willingly participates in state-run propaganda rallies, conducts morality policing (for instance, by physically enforcing the hijab law and reporting unveiled women to the authorities), and even voluntarily takes to the streets to suppress anti-regime protests, as in 2022. Crucially, members of this constituency are the same individuals the IRGC and its domestic militia, the Basij, recruit. While there are no official statistics on the number of people who make up this hard base, assessments suggest that it is no bigger than 8 million people, or approximately 10 percent of the population. This figure can also be corroborated by the number of Iranians who volunteered to take the domestic IRGC homemade COVID-19 vaccine instead of internationally approved shots.
Over the past year, however, a series of perceived betrayals has shaken what Khamenei and the senior leadership of the IRGC had always viewed as an unthinkingly obedient base. Cracks would first start to emerge after the sudden death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, whose constituency and administration were based entirely on this hard base. After Raisi’s death, it was expected that Saeed Jalili, a close ally of the late president, would succeed him. This expectation was not without reason. Since 2019, Khamenei has launched an ideological “purification” plan that sought to empower a new generation of hard-line zealots across every branch of the regime. However, this time, Khamenei and the senior IRGC leadership likely intervened to prevent Jalili from becoming president and instead installed the “reformist” Masoud Pezeshkian.
This decision was shaped by the poor performance of Raisi’s ideological technocrats, which had accelerated Iran’s crises, as well as preparations for the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House and his imposition of “maximum pressure.” Khamenei had calculated that a president under a so-called reformist guise could divide the West against Tehran. This decision received wide backlash from the hard base, who viewed Pezeshkian’s presidency as an ideological betrayal of the pledge to continue Raisi’s path, so much so that suspicions were even raised about the cause of the helicopter crash that resulted in the death of Raisi, with a rumor circulating that it was an inside job.
But betrayals were about to go from bad to worse. The next major blow would occur when the supreme leader gave the green light to Pezeshkian to appoint former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif as vice president for strategic affairs. For eight years, Khamenei and the IRGC had mobilized the hard base to attack and run psychological warfare operations against Zarif. They said he was an American spy and regime traitor and even accused him of insulting the late IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani, whom they regard as a messianic Shiite warrior.
These domestic setbacks were further compounded when the Khamenei-run Supreme National Security Council intervened to delay the implementation of the newly passed draconic morality policing codes. This decision triggered attacks on the regime’s leadership, with the hard base openly accusing the senior oligarchy of the Islamic Republic of ideological corruption and abandoning one of the most essential pillars of the Islamic revolution.
But this disillusionment is not just linked to Iran’s domestic affairs. Israel successfully decapitating the so-called axis of resistance—including Hamas and Hezbollah—and assassinating senior Hezbollah and IRGC commanders has also enraged members of this base. They openly began to question the ideological commitment of the IRGC’s oligarchy and the leadership’s hesitancy to strike Israel—and have suggested they are colluding with Israel’s intelligence services. Even when the IRGC conducted unprecedented direct attacks on Israel, the ineffectiveness of the regime’s missiles and drones, which Iranian commanders had always boasted about, further demoralized the hard base that had always believed the regime’s propaganda about the IRGC’s capabilities.
The final straw, however, would take place over 700 miles from Iran, with the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. The fall of Assad has once again flared anger toward Khamenei and the senior IRGC oligarchy. For the hard base, many of whom voluntarily fought and shed blood in Syria against Salafi-jihadi groups, Khamenei’s decision to stand by and watch Syria fall to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-led rebels was regarded as another betrayal. That’s because the hard base had been continuously told that preserving Syria was about preserving Shiite Islam and the “holy Shiite shrines,” rather than just Assad.
And now, after being demoralized about Syria and all the other factors, the hard base is enraged at the fact that the Islamic Republic’s leadership is signaling that it would be open to negotiations with Trump, who ordered the assassination of Suleimani during his first term as U.S. president. Since Suleimani’s death, Khamenei and the IRGC commanders have vowed to take “hard revenge” and assassinate Trump and all others involved in the strike that killed Suleimani. The possibility that the regime would even consider shaking hands with Suleimani’s murderer has only enraged this group further.
The erosion of the ideological hard base constituency is likely to have profound implications for the Islamic Republic. Khamenei and the IRGC are fully aware that, more so than any other demographic group in Iran, the erosion of the hard base puts the very existence of the Islamic Republic at risk as it is members from this small but ideologically extreme constituency that comprise the regime’s foot soldiers who suppress Iranians each time anti-regime protests erupt.
Against this backdrop, Khamenei and the IRGC have wasted little time trying to rectify this existential crisis, though, admittedly, they have few options. To regain support from the hard base, the Islamic Republic has no choice but to reinvigorate its ideological policies at home and abroad.
Khamenei knows, though, he will have little room to maneuver in the Middle East as the new Trump administration has wasted no time in reimposing maximum pressure on the regime to restrict its ability to finance its terrorist militias. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has also made it clear that Israel will not sit by and allow Tehran to rearm the groups that collectively declared war on it after Oct. 7, 2023.
Khamenei’s limited options to satisfy the needs of the hard base in foreign affairs mean he will likely seek to satisfy them internally. Zarif and Abdolnaser Hemmati, Pezeshkian’s economic minister, appear to be the first victims to this cause. The former foreign minister’s resignation from the Pezeshkian administration is unlikely to have taken place without support from Khamenei and senior IRGC leadership, who know all too well that Zarif’s fall will buy lost capital. Likewise, in his last speech, the supreme leader surprised many by ruling out talks with Trump, contrary to his initial signaling that negotiations with the new U.S. administration were possible.
But this alone will not satisfy this constituency. Domestically, to regain support, Khamenei will need to intensify the imposition of Islamist ideological policies, not least morality policing. Of course, that is a perilous game for the ayatollah since it will lead to a backlash among the broader population, increasing the chance of mass unrest against the regime again. And here is the paradox for Khamenei: water down ideological policies and risk losing the foot soldiers of his suppressive apparatus, or intensify them and increase the chance of mass protests. Both scenarios raise an existential threat to the Islamic Republic and may result in Khamenei facing the same destined fate as Assad.
Saeid Golkar is a senior fellow at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Service at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Kasra Aarabi is the director of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps research at United Against Nuclear Iran, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute, and the former Iran Program lead at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. X: @KasraAarabi
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