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Retirees returned to the streets in several Iranian cities on September 27, 2026, as deteriorating living standards continued to turn longstanding pension and welfare grievances into recurring public protests. Steel and Isfahan Steel retirees demonstrated in Isfahan, while Social Security pensioners gathered in Tehran and Shush. In Shush, protesters chanted “The street is the workers’ stronghold,” “Our pension is enough for only one week,” and “We have heard many promises; they were all lies.” In Isfahan, retirees vowed not to stop until their demands were met.
The unrest extends beyond pensioners. Contract drivers working for Tabriz municipality also protested over low wages, benefits and insurance conditions, while retirees in Shush demanded that the Social Security Organization remain independent of the government, payment of government debts to the fund and pensions sufficient to meet living costs. The demonstrations continue a broader pattern of labor and pension unrest documented across Iran in recent weeks.
The immediate economic backdrop remains severe. The free-market dollar traded around 234,480 tomans on September 27, roughly 13.8 percent above its level a month earlier. Meanwhile, the IRGC-run Tasnim estimated year-on-year liquidity growth at 54.4 percent in August, describing the level as still exceptionally high and warning that renewed monetary expansion could accelerate inflation again. Workers are also still waiting for a promised midyear wage review; a labor activist writing for Tasnim said official tables and the reality of a worker’s shopping basket had become “two different worlds.”
Zahedan Gunfire Shadows Basij-#IRGC Parade Amid Sanctions, Police Abuse and Division
by Amir Taghatihttps://t.co/R9vljTNE3I— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 18, 2026
Emergency Government Meets Institutional Feuding
The worsening economic picture coincides with increasingly open conflict within the ruling establishment. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf formally challenged a Cabinet decision extending legal and regulatory deadlines because of the wartime emergency. In a letter to President Masoud Pezeshkian, Ghalibaf declared that the government had no authority to extend deadlines established by legislation, arguing that only the legislature could alter them.
The dispute is significant less as conventional parliamentary oversight than as another battle over authority inside a state operating under prolonged emergency conditions. That struggle became still more personal when hardline MP Hamid Rasaee announced that he had received a 10-month prison sentence for publishing allegedly false material following a complaint by Ghalibaf. Rasaee said judicial cases had also been initiated against several MPs following complaints from Hassan Rouhani, Pezeshkian and the former secretariat of the Supreme National Security Council.
Rasaee used his parliamentary speech to accuse rival factions of selective justice, calling his sentence political while contrasting it with what he described as failure to pursue economic corruption and money that had not been repatriated through sanctions-bypassing “trustee” networks. He also claimed that members of the armed forces were telling him their salaries did not last even ten days while some banking salaries reached hundreds of millions of tomans. Those allegations being aired from the parliamentary floor illustrates how economic grievances are being weaponized inside the factional struggle itself.
"Iran is entering the final days of September under simultaneous pressure from soaring living costs, a weakened #currency, fuel shortages and problems across industrial supply chains," @MansoreGolestan writes.https://t.co/N7NEb86C1o
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 19, 2026
The Sharyan Front, with which Rasaee is affiliated, went further, alleging that efforts were underway to silence several other hardline MPs, including Mahmoud Nabavian, Amir-Hossein Sabeti, Rouhollah Izadkhah, Kamran Ghazanfari and Abolfazl Zohravand. The organization offered no evidence for the assertion, but its statement demonstrates how quickly a judicial case has been reframed by one regime faction as a broader purge by another.
Political Conflict Moves into the Street
Factional confrontation is also spilling outside official institutions. Videos showed regime supporters gathering at Mehrabad Airport around Pezeshkian’s return from New York and chanting against “infiltrated officials.” Elsewhere, hardline demonstrators again gathered outside former president Hassan Rouhani’s home demanding his prosecution after his calls for an “honorable” conclusion to the war. Rouhani has since insisted that his remarks were distorted and that he never explicitly called for a referendum.
"Iran’s accumulating #economic pressures moved visibly into the streets on September 20, 2026, as retirees demonstrated in several cities while the rial again weakened sharply," writes @shahriarkia.https://t.co/scTS9SL15B
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 20, 2026
The important development is that Iran’s social and political crises are becoming increasingly difficult to compartmentalize. Retirees are no longer simply complaining about actuarial formulas; they are chanting that only the street can deliver their rights. At the same time, rival centers of power are using courts, emergency-law arguments and competing accusations of corruption and disloyalty against one another.
For a ruling establishment that has spent months demanding “unity” and warning against signals of weakness, the problem is increasingly visible from within: social anger is becoming more openly political just as the institutions expected to contain it are themselves engaged in an escalating struggle over authority, affordability and survival.