The Distant Promise of Iran’s Would-Be King

Newyorker-March22nd2026

For about three weeks, Reza Pahlavi, the sixty-five-year-old son of the deposed Shah of Iran, appeared to be the most obvious figure to lead an overthrow of the Islamic Republic. The protests that broke out across the country at the end of December were triggered by the collapse of the rial and exorbitant inflation in food prices. But they soon came to target the whole theocracy and its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. On January 6th, Pahlavi sought to seize the moment, issuing a video message in which he called on Iranians to join together and chant slogans against the regime from their homes and in the streets. Two days later, Iran witnessed an unprecedented wave of protests, with demonstrations held in more than a hundred and fifty cities. In the capital, streams of people converged on overpasses and boulevards, calling not just for the end of the regime but for the return of Pahlavi himself, chanting “Long live the Shah.”

For years, Pahlavi had presented himself as a unifying figure, in keeping with a tradition of Iranian kingship as the glue that had held the fractious Persian Empire together. His strategists, ancien-régime figures who had surrounded him for nearly thirty years, believed that an inclusive approach would showcase his ability to lead and secure potential backers in the U.S. and in Europe. As recently as 2022, Pahlavi was trying to work within the often quarrelsome sphere of Iranian diaspora politics. During the Women, Life, Freedom movement that fall, prominent activists in Washington, D.C., were vying to take credit for sparking the nationwide protests. When a coalition of figures assembled at a Georgetown University forum, in February, 2023, the former Crown Prince sat humbly in a row of eight, alongside two actresses, a soccer player, and an Iranian Kurdish separatist.

Various strands of the opposition—ethnic minorities, leftists, and educated technocrats—appeared determined to block him, even at the price of leaving the regime in place. By then, Pahlavi was surrounded by a younger entourage of analysts and advisers, some of whom were brash figures once associated with the country’s reformist student movement. “I could imagine his advisers telling him, ‘You’re the King. You can’t surround yourself with people who don’t even acknowledge or respect your station,’ ” an Iranian analyst in Washington told me.

That April, two months after the Georgetown event, Pahlavi announced on X that he would no longer align himself with any single dissident group, a gesture that effectively positioned him as a leader of the opposition above all others. “When I was serving as his strategic counsellor, his philosophy was ‘Today, only unity,’ ” Mehrdad Youssefiani, who served as Pahlavi’s chief of staff for seventeen years, said. “Now his social-media presence projects the image ‘Today only me.’ To the critical audiences he needs to draw into his coalition, that’s an imperial posture that belies all his rhetoric of inclusive coalition.”