So many have drawn parallels with the of the protests in Iran as a Berlin Wall moment, that rare historical instant when fear dissolves, momentum accelerates, and a people suddenly realise that the power looming over them has already begun to rot from within. For a brief and intoxicating period, the metaphor appeared to hold. But nostalgia and yearning can be a contemptible form of comfort.

As soon as it spread, it encountered something far older and far more predictable, as the familiar reflexes of a failing tyranny reasserted themselves through organised brutality, exemplary violence, and the calculated production of fear. Streets were not quieted through persuasion or compromise but cleared through blood and terror by the Iranian regime.

Now early confidence seemed to have smouldered within the very flames of the fires engulfing Iran, consumed by the heat of the moment it once fed. I think we all hoped for this to the Berlin Wall moment in its predictability. However, the cracks in Islamic Republic, does now seem to suggest a weakening in its durability.

A measure of truth in this recalibration but taken too far it risks mistaking endurance for strength and repression for stability.

The contrasts with the past are real and cannot be ignored. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, authoritarian though he was, ultimately did decide to do a departure over mass killing, while the clerical establishment and the Revolutionary Guards have shown no such hesitation. The opposition of the late 1970s was more unified, more organisationally embedded, and more capable of sustaining pressure, and members of the ruling elite could plausibly imagine lives beyond power. Today’s leadership, many directly implicated in violence and repression, confronts a starker calculation in which survival and domination appear inseparable.

Yet even these differences obscure a more consequential one.

The Islamic Republic governs as close to a pariah state: a country gradually emptied out by sanctions, corruption, and misrule, where institutions stagger rather than serve and legitimacy has been replaced by coercion.

Force can disguise this reality for a time, but it cannot resolve it, and a state that relies almost exclusively on fear eventually discovers that fear is a brittle foundation on which to govern.

That is the predicament Iran now faces, and it centres on one figure whose continued presence has frozen political possibility for more than three decades.

As long as Ali Khamenei remains supreme leader, meaningful political evolution is effectively impossible, not because reformist impulses have never existed within the system as Iran’s institutions is quite complex which I won’t be able to invest time to. However, they have been systematically crushed. Since 1989, his response to pressure — economic crisis, popular unrest, or international isolation — has been consistent and unforgiving, favouring repression over accommodation and loyalty over competence. Over time, this has produced not merely stagnation but a deliberate hollowing-out of the state, in which adaptability itself became suspect.

Now elderly, increasingly secluded, and presiding over a leadership depleted by recent Israeli strikes, Khamenei casts a long shadow over a future he is unlikely to see. A prolonged twilight would likely deepen repression and entrench elite paralysis, while a sudden departure might temporarily see a period of uncertainty and a power vacuum.

What emerges from that uncertainty will depend on forces that extend well beyond the streets

External intervention may shape events at the margins, but history offers little comfort that it can deliver liberty, and Western powers have often preferred negotiated stability with familiar authoritarians to the risk’s inherent instability. The opposition, meanwhile, remains emotionally powerful yet organisationally fragile, with symbolism travelling far faster than trust or structure, and many drawn to prominent voices less from settled allegiance than from exhaustion and despair.

If Iran is ever to become a democracy rather than a rearranged autocracy, the engine of that transformation must come from within, and the West must embolden these groups. Offering a reliable Group haven for them to speak from both outside and inside Iran. An international pressure to further isolate them from parts of the world and better enforcement of sanctions or trade restrictions like the EU is considering by closing a loophole on their existing sanctions.

The lesson is not that Iran is without hope, but that liberation is rarely cinematic, unfolding instead through long and painful interregnums in which decay advances faster than collapse, and courage, however luminous, proves necessary but never sufficient.

* Andrew Chandler is the Digital Officer for North Staffordshire Liberal Democrats