Iran’s Leaders May Survive Protests. But Anger Will Likely Persist.

The protests in Iran against the Islamic Republic appear broader and more combative than ever before. The government crackdown is also more violent.

The regime and its 86-year-old Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, see the spreading protests as an existential threat, experts and analysts said, and they have responded with force to protect the government and their own institutional interests.

After the government’s nearly 50 years in power, many in Iran have come to see it as having betrayed its promise of a better life for all Iranians. They have turned out in large numbers across the country demanding an end to the regime.

Though many would like these protests to overthrow the government, much as the shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979, there is a degree of wishful thinking involved, the analysts suggested. The government is likely to quash the current unrest, they said, even as the demonstrations expose popular discontent that may be impossible to suppress in the longer term.

“The regime felt an existential angst and brought down the iron fist, so I feel this round is probably done,” Ali Vaez, Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, a research institution, said of the protests. “But since the regime can only suppress and not address the underlying causes, it is only buying time until the next round of confrontation between the state and society.”

With the internet blackout of Iran, it is hard to get a clear picture of the protests or a sense of the death toll. But public fury will persist, predicted Vali Nasr, an Iran expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. “The protests were extremely significant, and even if they dissipate, the anger that they produced has not gone away,” he said in a briefing for the Quincy Institute, a Washington-based research organization.