He has been in exile for practically 50 years. His father — Iran’s shah — was so broadly hated that tens of millions took to the streets in 1979, forcing him from energy. Nonetheless, Iran’s Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi is attempting to place himself as a participant in his nation’s future.
Pahlavi efficiently spurred protesters onto the streets Thursday night time in an enormous escalation of the protests sweeping Iran. Initially sparked by the Islamic Republic’s ailing financial system, the demonstrations have develop into a severe problem to its theocracy, battered by years of nationwide protests and a 12-day warfare in June launched by Israel that noticed the U.S. bomb nuclear enrichment websites.
What’s unknown is how a lot actual help the 65-year-old Pahlavi, who’s in exile within the U.S., has in his homeland. Do protesters desire a return of the Peacock Throne, as his father’s reign was recognized? Or are the protesters simply on the lookout for something that isn’t Iran’s Shiite theocracy?
Pahlavi issued calls, rebroadcast by Farsi-language satellite tv for pc information channels and web sites overseas, for Iranians to return to the streets Friday night time.
“Over the previous decade, Iran’s protest motion and dissident group has been more and more nationalist in tone and tenor,” stated Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran skilled with the Washington-based Basis for Protection of Democracies, which faces sanctions from Tehran.
“The extra the Islamic Republic has failed, the extra it has emboldened its antithesis. … The success of the crown prince and his group has been in drawing a pointy distinction between the normalcy of what was and the promise of what might be, versus the nightmare and current predicament that’s the actuality for thus many Iranians.”
Pahlavi’s profile rose once more throughout President Donald Trump’s first time period. Nonetheless, Trump and different world leaders have been hesitant to embrace him, given the numerous cautionary tales within the Center East and elsewhere of Western governments placing their religion in exiles lengthy estranged from their homelands.
Iranian state media, which for years mocked Pahlavi as being out of contact and corrupt, blamed “monarchist terrorist parts” for the demonstrations Thursday night time throughout which automobiles had been burned and police kiosks attacked.
Born Oct. 31, 1960, Pahlavi lived in a gilded world of luxurious because the crown prince to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
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Mohammed Reza had inherited the throne from his personal father, a military officer who seized energy with help from the British.
Mohammed Reza’s rule was cemented by a 1953 CIA-backed coup, and he cooperated intently with the Individuals, who offered the autocratic ruler billions of {dollars} of weapons and spied on the Soviet Union from Iran.
The younger Pahlavi was schooled on the eponymous Reza Pahlavi College, arrange inside the partitions of Niavaran Palace in northern Tehran. A biographer of his father famous the crown prince as soon as performed rock music within the palace throughout a New 12 months’s Eve go to to Tehran by then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
However the fall of the Peacock Throne loomed.
Whereas efficiently using rising oil costs within the Nineteen Seventies, deep financial inequality set in in the course of the shah’s rule and his feared SAVAK intelligence company turned infamous for the torture of dissidents.
Hundreds of thousands throughout the nation participated in protests towards the shah, uniting secular leftists, labor unions, professionals, college students and Muslim clergy. Because the disaster reached a fever pitch, the shah was doomed by his incapacity to behave and poor choices whereas secretly preventing terminal most cancers.
In 1978, Crown Prince Reza left his homeland for flight faculty at a U.S. air base in Texas. A 12 months later, his father fled Iran in the course of the onset of what turned generally known as the Islamic Revolution. Shiite clerics squeezed out different anti-shah factions, establishing a brand new theocratic authorities that executed hundreds after the revolution and to this present day stays one of many world’s high executioners.
After his father’s loss of life, a royal court docket in exile introduced that Reza Pahlavi assumed the position of the shah on Oct. 31, 1980, his twentieth birthday.
“I can perceive and sympathize together with your sufferings and your inside torment,” Pahlavi stated, addressing Iranians in a speech on the time. “I shed the tears which you could cover. But there may be, I’m certain, gentle past the darkness. Deep in your hearts it’s possible you’ll be assured that this nightmare, like others in our historical past, will cross.”
However what adopted has been practically 5 many years in exile.
Pahlavi tried to realize affect overseas. In 1986, The Washington Publish reported that the CIA equipped the prince’s allies “a miniaturized tv transmitter for an 11-minute clandestine broadcast” to Iran by Pahlavi that pirated the sign of two stations within the Islamic Republic.
“I’ll return and collectively we’ll pave the way in which for the nation’s happiness and prosperity by freedom,” Pahlavi reportedly stated within the broadcast.
That didn’t occur. Pahlavi largely lived overseas in the USA in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., whereas his mom, the Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi, lived in Paris.
Circles of diehard Iranian monarchists in exile have lengthy touted desires of the Pahlavi dynasty returning to energy. However Pahlavi has been hampered in gaining wider enchantment by quite a lot of elements: bitter recollections of his father’s rule; the notion that he and his household are out of contact with their homeland; and repression inside Iran that goals to silence any opposition sentiment.
On the similar time, youthful generations in Iran born many years after the shah’s rule ended have grown up beneath a distinct expertise; social restrictions and brutal suppression by the Islamic Republic and financial turmoil beneath worldwide sanctions, corruption and mismanagement.
Pahlavi has sought to have a voice by social media movies, and Farsi-language information channels resembling Iran Worldwide have highlighted his requires protests. The channel additionally aired QR codes that led to data for safety pressure members inside Iran who wish to cooperate with him.
An interactive map of protests in Iran from December 29, 2025, to January 5, 2026. (AP Digital Embed).
Mahmood Enayat, the final supervisor of Iran Worldwide’s proprietor Volant Media, stated the channel ran Pahlavi’s advert and others “on a professional bono foundation” as “a part of our mission to help Iran’s civil society.”
In interviews in recent times, Pahlavi has raised the thought of a constitutional monarchy, maybe with an elected moderately than a hereditary ruler. However he has additionally stated it’s as much as Iranians to decide on.
“This regime is solely irreformable as a result of the character of it, its DNA, is such that it can’t,” Pahlavi advised The Related Press in 2017. “Individuals have given up with the thought of reform they usually suppose there must be elementary change. Now, how this alteration can happen is the large query.”
He has additionally confronted criticism for his help of and from Israel, significantly after the June warfare.
“My focus proper now could be on liberating Iran, and I’ll discover any signifies that I can, with out compromising the nationwide pursuits and independence, with anybody who’s keen to offer us a hand, whether or not it’s the U.S. or the Saudis or the Israelis or whomever it’s,” he stated in 2017.
