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File photo: Iranian regime’s parliament (Majlis) members chanting “Death to America” on December 12, 2024
Three-minute read
As inflation surges, executions reach record levels, and international isolation tightens, the clerical dictatorship is experiencing one of the most acute periods of internal discord in its four-decade history. The once carefully contained factional competition within the ruling elite has broken into open conflict, exposing a leadership unsure of its direction, fractured in strategy, and increasingly mistrustful of itself.
From heated public attacks between former presidents and senior diplomats, to renewed debates over nuclear weapons, to clerics and commanders warning against “division,” the clearest message emerging from Tehran is that the crisis is no longer merely economic or diplomatic—it is systemic.
#Iran’s Ruling Establishment Faces Multi-Front Crisis as Internal Rifts Intensifyhttps://t.co/4IFly4FTgG
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) November 1, 2025
Internal Strain, Outward Belligerence
As domestic pressures intensify, the clerical regime’s outward rhetoric has grown increasingly defiant. On November 2, 2025, Mohammad-Javad Larijani, a senior regime insider and longtime figure in Iran’s foreign policy apparatus, made a striking declaration: Iran, he said, represents a “new theory” in global politics—that a country capable of producing a nuclear bomb “in less than two weeks” is choosing not to.
He cited the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s fatwa against nuclear weapons as proof of restraint. Yet his remarks came just weeks after 70 members of parliament publicly called for that same fatwa to be reversed—arguing that Iran must build and maintain a bomb for “deterrence.”
Similar appeals have surfaced repeatedly since early 2023, from former foreign ministerial advisers to senior national security figures. Their message is that only heightened confrontation and sharper rhetoric can restore confidence among demoralized cadres who have witnessed the bombing of nuclear, drone, and missile facilities, the assassination of senior commanders, and the weakening of Tehran’s regional networks.
Intensifying Power Struggles in #Tehran Reveal a State Losing Internal Controlhttps://t.co/4Alzx62spt
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) October 30, 2025
The Economy as Pressure Point
The most forceful accelerant of this insecurity is the economy. On November 1, Haadi Ghavami, deputy chair of the parliament’s budget committee, acknowledged that the government faces a staggering fiscal shortfall: 800 trillion tomans already, potentially rising to 1.8 quadrillion by year’s end. These are not abstract figures; they represent the widening gap between the state’s promises and its capacities. Ghavami cited inflated oil-export projections and structural deficiencies in revenue collection—not sanctions alone—as core drivers.
Elsewhere in the state’s own rhetoric, the story is similar. A major banking scandal surrounding Bank Ayandeh has become a symbol of systemic erosion. In Tehran’s Friday sermon on October 31, the interim Friday prayer leader Mohammad Javad Haj-Ali Akbari conceded that delayed intervention had inflicted “serious harm to public trust.” The problem, he claimed, was not merely corruption—but the inability of institutions to enforce discipline or deliver accountability.
In Arak, Friday prayer leader Dorri Najafabadi acknowledged that “the bank’s money is the people’s money” and demanded accountability from exporters and managers. But his tone made clear the purpose: to pin blame on the bank itself, not on the state structures that enabled the corruption.
#Iran Faces Deepening Power Struggles Amid @UN Sanctions “Snapback” https://t.co/7CqMVhSUWz
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 1, 2025
A Crisis of Narrative
Most revealing, perhaps, is that the regime’s own officials are now admitting to falsehoods broadcast as state triumphs. On November 1, MP Mohammad Bagheri publicly stated that claims of downing an American F-35 fighter jet and capturing its pilot had been fabricated. “We did not shoot down an F-35. We did not capture a pilot,” he said. “It was all untrue.”
This admission undercuts the regime’s core narrative of strength, the mythology used to reassure its base that sacrifice is meaningful and loyalty worthwhile. For years, military spectacle has functioned as a substitute for economic performance and political legitimacy. When an insider concedes that these spectacles were staged, morale erodes inside the very institutions tasked with enforcing obedience.
Friday prayer pulpits have also begun to reflect that anxiety. Across Tehran, Mashhad, Arak, and Abadan, senior clerics devoted their weekly addresses not to foreign foes but to internal loyalty. They warned of “division,” accused those advocating diplomacy of “Stockholm Syndrome,” and demanded unity against unnamed actors within the system itself. When a regime’s principal call is no longer mobilization against “the foreign foe,” but discipline among its own, the stakes have changed.
From Parliament to the Marketplace, Crisis Layers Converge Across #Iranhttps://t.co/AozMSSDCQJ
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) October 28, 2025
Coercion in a Tightening Circle
As the state’s ideological and economic tools lose effectiveness, it has intensified its reliance on coercion. Executions have surged to some of their highest levels in decades. Yet even establishment figures now question the strategy’s logic. In a widely discussed column in Etemad, Abbas Abdi argued that capital punishment no longer restores order; it expands the circle of violence. By normalizing death as punishment, he wrote, the state erodes the ethical boundaries that sustain social trust—and strengthens the appeal of radical opposition.
Abdi’s critique is not humanitarian. It is diagnostic. He suggests the regime may be undermining the very stability it is trying to preserve. When the state’s most loyal voices warn that its methods are accelerating the forces of collapse, the crisis can no longer be dismissed as foreign-engineered or socially contained.
#Iran’s Ruling Elite Consumed by Infighting Amid Economic Ruin and Public Ragehttps://t.co/0Wk9C2RtFP
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) October 22, 2025
A System Beyond Salvation
The reemergence of open internal disputes suggests a system suspended between failure and fear—unable to coordinate policy, unsure of its ideological footing, and reliant on displays of strength it can no longer reliably produce.
The nuclear debate is the clearest mirror. The question is no longer moral or strategic; it is psychological. The regime is trying to convince itself that it still possesses agency. A confident state does not insist upon its restraint. A confident state does not reassure its public of its capabilities. A confident state does not fear that unity must be enforced—or rely on executions to keep society in check.
The clerical dictatorship today is not debating whether to build a bomb. It is debating whether it remains in control of its own future.