The fortieth day after a death carries special significance in Shiite tradition, often marking a moment of collective mourning and reflection.
Families of those killed in the January 8 and 9 crackdown marked the occasion this week with memorial ceremonies across the country, even as authorities maintained a heavy security presence.
On February 17, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, President Massoud Pezeshkian and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf repeated the government’s longstanding assertion that foreign forces played a decisive role in fueling the protests.
At the same time, officials acknowledged that some of those killed were “innocent,” drawing a distinction that appeared intended to preserve the official narrative while recognizing the scale of the bloodshed.
Yet beneath that public consensus, alternative interpretations are emerging—even from figures long associated with the system.
Hassan Beyadi, a hardliner and secretary-general of the Abadgaran (Developers) Party, which helped propel Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency in 2005, offered a starkly different assessment in an interview with Khabar Online.
“People came to the streets because their dignity was trampled by politicians,” Beyadi said, describing the unrest as a reaction to corruption, discrimination and violations of basic citizenship rights.
Only “essential changes in the structure of the system and its economic policies” could restore public trust, he added.
A more conservative but still revealing analysis came from Abbas Ghaemi, a director at the Social Analysis Center of Imam Sadeq University, an institution closely tied to the Islamic Republic’s political elite.
Ghaemi argued that many participants in the January protests had already been shaped by previous waves of unrest, including the 2009 Green Movement, the 2018 and 2019 economic protests and the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom uprising.
“We are facing a society that has tried many different ways without achieving results,” he said.
Ghaemi emphasized the need for dialogue between society and the political system, an idea that has surfaced periodically within establishment circles but has rarely translated into sustained engagement.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, who holds ultimate authority over state policy, has never granted a media interview during his more than three decades in power.
Analyses published in Iranian media since the crackdown point to broader structural concerns, with some commentators describing a society marked by declining trust, growing anger and widening distance between the state and its citizens.
Former government spokesman Ali Rabiei, writing in the reformist-leaning newspaper Etemad, warned against attempts to channel public anger into state-controlled expressions of mourning.
“Looking at the frosty streets of Iran in Winter 2026,” he wrote, “it is clear that turning angry protesters into mourning protesters and vice versa reflects the inefficiency of a policy that will lead to one crisis after another if the system remains unreformed.”
Such warnings suggest the state may be struggling to fully impose its narrative of the unrest, even within establishment circles.
