Reza Pahlevi, the deposed crown prince raised up by the desperation of the Iranian people

An investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, published on October 3, revealed that a private entity funded by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu had carried out a large-scale digital influence campaign to enhance the image of Reza Pahlavi, the crown prince of the overthrown dynasty of the same name — that of his father, the last shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi — whose removal led to the proclamation of the Islamic Republic in February 1979.

The campaign not only boosted the image of the prince — who for years frequented gossip magazines more than the corridors of power — but also falsely amplified his support in Iran through avatars, fake online profiles posing as Iranian citizens. When the Iranian regime completely shut down internet access last Thursday to conceal its crackdown on the protests, many users posing as Iranians within the country continued to spread messages in support of Pahlavi.

These suspicious messages echoed one certain fact and one dubious one. The first is that, in some of the demonstrations, alongside shouts of “Death to the dictator” (Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei), slogans such as “Long live the shah” or “Pahlevi will return” were chanted. The dubious point is that the Iranians who took to the streets last Thursday — in greater numbers than in previous days — to protest were responding to a call the prince had made hours earlier to his compatriots to continue demonstrating.

The slogans in support of the shah’s son are a novelty that, other than in anecdotal cases, had not been heard in previous waves of protests in Iran. Nor had so many monarchist flags bearing the sun and lion been seen in previous demonstrations.

However, for Karim Emile Bitar, a research associate on the Middle East at the Paris Institute for International and Strategic Relations (IRIS), this fact is not very significant. The expert believes that this “visibility” primarily reflects “the vacuum that characterizes the current Iranian opposition,” which has made Pahlavi perhaps the only dissident figure to whom citizens can appeal in a country where “most credible opposition figures have been imprisoned, placed under house arrest, monitored, or killed by the regime.” The prince is a “blank canvas,” asserts Iranian historian Rouzbeh Parsi, onto which “desperate” Iranians project their yearning for change and, in doing so, anger the regime.

Legitimacy

The median age in Iran is 34-35, and more than 70% of citizens weren’t even born when, at the end of his reign, the last shah traveled around Tehran by helicopter and spoke in public from inside a bulletproof glass case for fear of assassination. Even fewer Iranians had been born in 1971, when the monarch threw a lavish party in Persepolis to commemorate the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire. Those festivities, with French champagne and dishes from the exclusive Maxim’s restaurant in Paris, cost, according to the BBC, $30 million at the time. The majority of Iranians were also not yet alive — or not old enough to remember — when, in 1975, Amnesty International deemed the Iranian monarchy one of the regimes that had most egregiously violated human rights, in collusion with SAVAK, its feared secret police.

Reza Pahlavi was born in 1960 into that court of ermine furs and diamond crowns that delighted the glossy magazines. At 17, he went to the United States to train as a fighter pilot. He never returned to Iran. A little over a year later, the popular revolution, later co-opted by its Islamist faction, overthrew his father and forced the Pahlavis into exile in January 1979. The prince, who has spent 48 of his 65 years outside his country, stated last Sunday that he is prepared to return to Iran, in an interview with the conservative American network Fox News.

According to calculations by journalist Robert Graham in his book Iran: The Illusion of Power, when the Pahlavis went into exile, their fortune amounted to at least $4 billion, deposited in Swiss banks. This money — the product of the plundering of the country’s resources — still allows the clan to maintain a lavish lifestyle and finance opposition activities against the Iranian regime, which until recently had always met with limited success. A 2009 report by the Brookings Institution asserted that the monarchist movement had virtually no presence in Iran.

For a long time, adds Karim Emile Bitar, Pahlavi’s popularity “was greater in Los Angeles or Neuilly-sur-Seine [an affluent suburb of Paris] than in Iran.” Contrary to what might be expected after the recent demonstrations, notes the IRIS researcher, the legitimacy of the heir to the Iranian dynasty remains “limited.”

Pahlavi has claimed to support the establishment of a liberal democracy and a constitutional monarchy, but he has never criticized his father’s regime. Many Iranians perceive him as a puppet of Israel — he refused to condemn that country’s bombings of Iran last June — and of the United States, whose president he constantly urges to intervene. Last Saturday, when he called on Iranians to take to the streets again and “seize the cities,” some of his compatriots criticized him on social media for asking protesters to risk their lives from his comfortable exile in the United States. In another interview, with CBS, when asked about the deaths in the protests — which have now reached at least 2,600, according to the NGO HRANA — he stated: “It’s a war, and in war there are casualties.”

Nostalgia

Raffaele Mauriello is a professor at Allameh Tatabata’i University in Tehran. This Iranologist explains from Italy that the prospect of Pahlavi as an alternative to the Islamic Republic was seen as “ridiculous” until very recently. He does, though, acknowledge that nostalgia for the shah’s regime has grown in recent years, especially among young people.

He notices it in his students, who “sometimes post something about the shah and, when you ask them, you realize they know nothing about that period.” Mauriello compares these young people to their Spanish contemporaries who are nostalgic for the Franco dictatorship.

Mariam, the pseudonym of a 37-year-old Iranian woman exiled in Spain, is one of those who, with no future in sight, has turned her gaze to the past. “I don’t consider myself a monarchist,” she says, although she views the prince favorably. She then adds that, “for many years, Pahlavi was the only opposition figure,” but notes that her fellow citizens want “a secular government, not a monarchy.”

“With no opposition, either inside or outside Iran, capable of proposing a credible and viable alternative to the Islamic Republic, Pahlavi is establishing himself as a potential figure who could ensure a transition,” says Bitar.

His chances of success are, in the expert’s opinion, limited. The prince can be seen “as a figure catapulted to power by foreign powers, supported by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, which arouses great distrust among Iranians, who are very nationalistic.” Furthermore, the researcher points out, “it is doubtful” that the Pahlavi heir can win “the support of ethnic minorities or resolve the economic and social crisis in a country he no longer knows.”

Above all, as analyst Ali Terrenoire points out in a document published Monday on his X account, this aristocrat has no party behind him, nor any structure or hierarchy. His figure merely conceals “symbolism and fantasies of leadership.”

In an opinion piece published in Time magazine, Iranian anthropologist Narges Bajoghli corroborated that real support for Pahlavi is minimal within his country. The professor at Johns Hopkins University also noted that popular support for the restoration of the monarchy is an “illusion” fabricated through disinformation campaigns and concluded that Trump’s refusal to meet with the son of the deposed shah is “a telling sign of how seriously even potential allies take the monarchist option.”

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