Fourth Day of Nationwide Iranian Protests as Rial Crashes and Central Bank Chief Fired

When Tehran’s Grand Bazaar last turned on the state—in the summer of 1978—the monarchy fell within nine months; earlier, Soviet coal-miners’ strikes in July 1989 foreshadowed the USSR’s collapse within two years. Whether 2025’s rial-driven turmoil is as portentous remains uncertain, but it exposes two long-running structural strains: an import-dependent oil economy being throttled by sanctions and mis-management, and a hyper-connected, youthful population whose political patience has eroded since the Green Movement of 2009, the fuel riots of 2019, and the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. The bazaar’s participation punctures the regime’s traditional support base, while simultaneous talk of fresh Israeli-U.S. strikes risks turning economic anger into nationalist defense—something autocracies have historically exploited. On a century scale, currency collapses often precede regime renegotiation or replacement; if the Islamic Republic cannot reverse the rial’s free-fall or curb external entanglements, this week may be remembered less for its street skirmishes than for signaling that Iran’s 1979 revolutionary model is approaching the limits of economic legitimacy in the 21st-century global system.