Iranian society today is wounded, frightened, yet politically alive and hopeful. Europe’s task is not to speak over it, contain it, or reduce it to a security problem. It is to recognize that the Iranian people are the real democratic actors in this story.
By Touska Gholami Khaljiri, Iranian women’s and children’s rights activist and researcher
For ten days, Iran has been under sustained airstrikes. But for many Iranians, this crisis did not begin ten days ago. It began decades earlier, when the Islamic Republic built a political order based on repression at home and confrontation abroad, while never treating civilian protection as a serious state responsibility. The recent military escalation made it clear that this regime was willing to bring war to the country, but never prepared its people for war.
There are no meaningful civilian shelters nor any credible warning system to help ordinary people respond to imminent danger. Instead of preserving access to information at a time of national emergency, the authorities have imposed an internet blackout. A government that abandons civilians in wartime while cutting them off from information is not protecting the population. It is controlling it.
The most vulnerable are, as always, those already under the regime’s direct control. Human rights reporting and testimony from families have described severe risks facing political prisoners, including suspended food distribution, water outages, catastrophic hygienic conditions, prison transfers without clear information, and a breakdown of meaningful supervision. In Iran, prisons are not separate from the political crisis; they are one of its clearest expressions. When war intensifies, detention becomes even more hidden, lawless, and dangerous.
Intimidation extends beyond prison walls. Iranian authorities have long relied not only on arrest and killing, but on terror inside neighborhoods and homes. International audiences often imagine repression as something clearly visible. In Iran, it is also intimate, cumulative, and designed to invade daily life. Yet even under these conditions, resistance continues.
A striking recent example came from the Iranian women’s national football team during the Women’s Asian Cup in Australia. Players who did not sing the anthem of the Islamic Republic were denounced on Iranian state television as “wartime traitors.” This was not a symbolic side story. It revealed the reach of the regime: even women representing Iran abroad are expected to perform loyalty under threat.
The internal succession process has only reinforced public anger. On 8 March, it was announced that Mojtaba Khamenei was appointed Supreme Leader after the death of his father, Ali Khamenei. What followed was telling. Within hours, reports emerged of people chanting “death to Mojtaba” from their windows. Even in war, blackout, and fear, the regime has failed to create genuine national unity.
Much of the outside commentary still frames Iran as a country split neatly between regime supporters and regime opponents. The reality is more complex. Some people have opposed external military intervention from the beginning and still do. Some who once argued for stronger international action are now questioning whether the current scale of force has gone too far. Others have expressed relief that buildings associated with the regime’s violence are now in ruins, and that key figures of repression, including Ali Khamenei, are gone. What unites many of these reactions is not agreement, but uncertainty. People are asking what comes next, and whether this moment will bring liberation, fragmentation, or another cycle of violence.
If the European Union genuinely wants to support a democratic and rights-based future for Iran, it must stop treating Iranian society as secondary to crisis management. Iranian civil society should be at the center of Europe’s approach. That means supporting independent journalists, protecting human rights defenders, helping activists maintain access to information during shutdowns, and backing documentation and accountability mechanisms so that crimes committed in Iran do not simply disappear into diplomacy. It also means stronger political measures against the repressive apparatus itself, including freezing assets of those tied to the authorities and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps(IRGC), and an end to the fiction of normal diplomatic relations with representatives of a system that terrorizes its own population.
At the same time, no outside actor can determine Iran’s political future on behalf of Iranians. A democratic order cannot be imposed from abroad. But international actors can help create the conditions in which people are able to decide their future freely. For many Iranians, that also means refusing any succession from within the same corrupted system. In my conversations, most Iranians I speak with, both inside Iran and in the diaspora, want the European Union to recognize Reza Pahlavi as Iran’s transitional leader.
Iranian society today is wounded, frightened, yet politically alive and hopeful. Europe’s task is not to speak over it, contain it, or reduce it to a security problem. It is to recognize that the Iranian people are the real democratic actors in this story.