Iran: A Systemic Crisis, but No Imminent Collapse

 

Iran: A Systemic Crisis, but No Imminent Collapse

By Paolo Falconio

For months, Iran has been experiencing a crisis unlike any of its previous ones. It is not merely economic, nor solely political, nor exclusively social. It is a systemic crisis, cutting across every layer of society and calling into question the implicit pact that has sustained the Islamic Republic for over four decades: stability in exchange for economic survival.

Today, that pact is fractured. And the rupture no longer concerns only the young, the women, the students, or the ethnic minorities. It reaches the economic heart of the country—the bazaars, the merchants, the urban families who for years ensured a form of passive consent. The rial is collapsing, inflation has surpassed unsustainable levels, and the cost of living has become a daily threat.

The protests that have erupted in recent months have no leader and no defined political program. They are spontaneous, cross-cutting, unpredictable—and yet the absence of a strategy and leadership makes them more fragile.

Still, from markets to universities, they are spreading into provincial cities. They are not asking only for reforms: they are demanding dignity, jobs, stability.

The government is responding with an ambivalent strategy: small signs of openness, accompanied by targeted arrests and temporary university closures. It is a familiar tactic, but today it is less effective. Because the root of the crisis is not political—it is material.

The security apparatus, however, is not crumbling.

Despite rumors circulating in some media circles, there are no credible signs of desertion or fragmentation within the Revolutionary Guards. The security apparatus remains cohesive, ideologically motivated, and structurally central to Iran’s power system. Losses among senior ranks, caused by external operations, do not equate to a weakening of internal loyalty.

And this is the decisive point: no political transformation in Iran has ever occurred without a vertical fracture within the centers of power. Today, that fracture does not exist.

Iran is not on the verge of regime change. But it has entered a new phase—more insidious than a slow erosion. It does not open scenarios of transition, but of unstable stagnation.

Tehran’s risk is not collapse: it is the chronicization of the crisis, with a country increasingly impoverished, a society increasingly disillusioned, and a political system ever more dependent on force to maintain order.

Iran finds itself in a historical limbo. Too strong to fall, too fragile to govern effectively.

The result is an unstable equilibrium that may last for years, perhaps decades, but that profoundly alters the nature of the regime: less ideological, more securitized; less popular, more isolated; less capable of offering a future, more focused on surviving the present.

In a Middle East already marked by tensions, this slow internal combustion is perhaps the most underestimated factor. Because a regime that does not fall but weakens is often more unpredictable than a regime that collapses.