With 2026 just around the corner, the streets of Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, and dozens of other Iranian cities are experiencing a wave of protests sparked by the historic collapse of the real in Tehran Bazaar on December 28th.
While coverage focused on the removal of currency subsidies and the soaring prices of basic goods, the front lines were not only occupied by the disadvantaged.
There is a widespread rebellious existence of the “middle class who have been pushed below the poverty line” and the “Generation Z, who have been robbed of their future.”
According to many analysts, this is not a typical 20th century revolution for bread. It is a “rebellion of the downtrodden.”
These are people whose education, skills, and cognitive level place them in the global middle class, but whose economic realities force them into an visceral struggle for daily survival.
They didn’t just take to the streets in search of cheap bread. They are reclaiming their rights to the future.
Big Downgrade: Status Anger
Iran is experiencing what sociologists call the “Great Downgrade.”
Full-time professionals such as software engineers, doctors and artists are unable to afford modest apartments or new laptops under the pressure of a 94% drop in national purchasing power and a 3,319% rise in the free market US dollar exchange rate over the past eight years, according to official statistics.
In this context, individuals did not lose their cultural identity, but rather their social status due to chronic inflation.
Trapped in the βpresent with no futureβ
In a functional economy, time is your friend. Work, save, and move toward goals such as buying a home or going to higher education.
Time is the enemy in Iran.
When inflation exceeds savings, the faster you run, the further you get from your aspirations. This generation is caught in a “temporal straitjacket,” with all its energy focused on immediate survival and no psychological space left for imagining a brighter tomorrow.
Being removed from your rank means being forced into a reverse time machine. Iran’s middle class feels like it has been regressing over the past few decades.
Purchases that were commonplace a decade ago, such as an economical car, international travel, and new digital devices, are now unaffordable luxuries.
While the world is progressing, this sense of regression creates serious “status anger.”
When βordinaryβ becomes luxurious
The cost of “normal life,” including high-speed internet, access to global media, personal choices in clothing, and job security, has risen so rapidly that it has effectively become a luxury.
Protesters realize that while experiencing the quality of life of a bygone era, they are paying the price for a 21st century standard of living.
below the “bottom of survival”
While the middle class bemoans the decline in quality of life, marginalized groups fight for biological survival.
The prices of necessities such as housing and protein have soared, and many people have been excluded from the social cycle. Phenomena such as sleeping on rented rooftops reflect the collapse of the survival floor.
The government that came to power in 1979 on a promise to support the disadvantaged (mostazafin) is now, in 2026, considered the most blatant form of crony capitalism.
A small number of individuals with close ties to the government have taken to social media to flaunt luxury cars and lavish lifestyles and preach abstinence to the population.
This blatant manifestation turned poverty into political injustice.
Alliance of βEmpty Stomach, Full Heartβ
In classical revolutions, the middle class often sides with the state out of fear of chaos.
But in Iran today, the middle class sees itself as a victim of the same regime.
When a worker who has not been paid for six months stands next to a student who does not know what job awaits him after graduation, a “mutual dialogue of suffering” is born and a unified national movement is stimulated.
Classical revolutions asked, βWho will rule?β Today’s protests ask, “How can we survive?”
Demands for a normal life, free internet, and stable currency are not negotiations for political power, but demands for breathing space.
Compromise is extremely difficult, as the political system has demonstrated its readiness to indefinitely sacrifice the “normality” of its people in order to protect its ideological tenets.
State subsidies and charities can no longer assuage the humiliation of a people who recognize that their poverty stems not from a lack of resources but from political mismanagement.
What the world is witnessing is not cyclical disruption but the emergence of new political models.
This movement is led by a globally connected generation and a devastated middle class, who have now come to the same conclusion: the cost of silence exceeds the cost of protest.
The goal is not to replace one ideology with another, but to replace the all-encompassing national ideology with the radical possibility of a “normal life” and a visible future.