Explained | Iran’s political system Premium

Explore Iran's political system, its unique structure of power, and the historical context shaping its current challenges.

Iran’s unique political system — which has been designed in such a way that the Shia clergy has ultimate authority in all critical matters related to the state, even as elections are held in regular intervals — is a child of the 1979 revolution.

While it’s popularly called the “Islamic revolution”, the anti-Shah movement was not just Islamic. True, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, who, while in exile in Iraq’s Najaf, had called for the Shah’s ouster, and became the embodiment of the mass agitations in the 1970s. But Iranians from different political sections, including nationalists, liberals, leftists and trade unionists, had actively joined the movement, seeking freedom from the Shah’s dictatorship.

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The Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who had to briefly flee the country in the early 1950s and was restored after the CIA helped the monarchists orchestrate a coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, was more or less detached from the political reality on ground. He orchestrated grand ceremonies celebrating the monarchy (such as the extravagant 1971 celebration of “the 2,500th year of the Iranian monarchy” spending some $100 million), banned all political parties except the monarchist Resurgence Party (Hezb-e-Rastakhiz) and assumed himself the title of Aryan Sun (Aryamehr) — apolitical and spiritual guide of Iran. When an increasingly isolated Shah tried to consolidate more and more powers in his hands, SAVAK, his secret police, ran amok in the country, rounding up political dissidents.

Iranians are no strangers to political rebellion and defiance. In 1896, Naser al-Din Shah, the fourth Shah of Qajar Iran, was assassinated inside a mosque in Tehran. The assassination and its aftermath would eventually lead to the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911, which led to the establishment of a Parliament in Persia.

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