Three-minute read
In Tehran this week, the regime’s insecurity is visible in the work it assigns to institutions that are supposed to look routine. A criminal court is turned into a briefing room on European broadcast regulation. A well-connected insider writes as if he is filing a warning to the security apparatus, not speaking to citizens. And the Resistance circulates a picture of pre-positioned repression—arguing that the state is preparing for the street, not governing for stability.
What follows is not a debate over the economy. It is a record of what the regime actually did and said—because its own undertakings reveal what it fears: organized opposition, the collapse of its narrative monopoly, and the prospect that public anger stops being private.
The Courtroom as a Censorship Desk
On Tuesday, December 16, 2025, the regime used the 49th session of its in-absentia case against 104 PMOI-linked defendants as a political broadcast—staged in a Tehran courtroom but aimed at Iranian living rooms. Practically, state media presented a judiciary that cannot win consent at home trying to reassert control over what Iranians can watch and what Europeans can host.
In the clearest tell of regime anxiety, the presiding judge fixated not on evidence but on Simaye Azadi, a satellite network affiliated with the Iranian Resistance. Throughout the session, the so-called judge effectively lectured Europe on how to shut the channel down—treating a Tehran trial as a venue to pressure regulators and carriers outside Iran’s borders. That obsession is political, not legal: Simaye Azadi’s value is that it breaks the state’s monopoly, amplifies protest footage, and speaks directly into a society the regime already knows is combustible.
The judge highlighted a “formal complaint” seeking action against officials in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, referenced filings to Ofcom, and threatened that European governments could be deemed responsible if they do not intervene—an attempt to outsource censorship through foreign regulatory systems. And the same session folded in the regime’s agitation over Mrs. Maryam Rajavi’s European Parliament appearance on Wednesday, December 10, 2025—treated as an intolerable grant of legitimacy and attacked in state-linked messaging precisely because it signals an organized alternative on an international stage.
Simaye Azadi’s 29th Telethon: A Beacon of Resistance and Hope for #Iran #FreeIranTelethon https://t.co/ZPJOr3YcHp
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) January 22, 2025
An Insider Puts Hunger on the Security Docket
Four days earlier, Friday, December 12, 2025, Hossein Marashi published a front-page warning in Sazandegi that reads less like policy commentary than a regime-preservation memo. He argued that a food-supply crisis could do what war and political pressure could not—driving “hungry people” into the streets.
The significance is not the economic diagnosis; it is the political translation. Marashi is speaking in the regime’s most sensitive vocabulary—crowds, contagion, and loss of control. He does not frame the problem as rights, dignity, or accountability; he frames it as the street as an endpoint, the kind of endpoint that turns intra-elite dispute into a shared survival imperative.
Official data and even regime-adjacent analytics tend to understate the gravity of the crisis. What Marashi’s intervention shows is the elite’s awareness that deterrence alone is not a solution: the state can threaten, arrest, and execute, but it cannot indefinitely govern a society that increasingly experiences daily life as coercion.
Clerical Regime in #Iran Sees Uprising Everywherehttps://t.co/r1zaUJf2pV
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) November 30, 2025
Resistance Exposure and the Preemption Playbook
On Monday, December 15, 2025, a statement published by mojahedin.org and attributed to a PMOI “social headquarters” inside Iran revealed the regime put repression forces on heightened readiness starting Saturday, December 13, 2025, explicitly tied to fear of protests amid gasoline-price sensitivity. The statement said that Tehran’s “security control” force was raised to 42,500—broken down as 23,000 police and 19,500 IRGC/Basij—and that commanders were instructed that suppressing internal unrest is the top priority even if an external conflict erupts.
The same disclosure described an expanded, preemptive street posture: intelligence and security forces deployed in plainclothes across Tehran for surveillance and rapid reporting of gatherings; armed checkpoints operating in 15-person teams from roughly 18:00 to 24:00; intensified patrols after dark; and a specific operational focus corridor spanning central Tehran toward Mehrabad. It further alleged that the IRGC expanded training for Basij forces in “restive” towns, convened anti-protest drills, offered cash incentives—including 2 million tomans per “engagement”—and emphasized tactics such as identifying “leaders” and using marking methods to single out demonstrators. The statement also said the regime reinforced protection of gas stations and fuel infrastructure, required routine photo/video reporting up chains of command, and tightened security around oil depots and transfer routes—measures that, taken together, read as a mobilization plan for containing street unrest rather than ordinary public-order policing.
#Iran’s Permanent Emergency: How the Regime Governs for the Next Uprisinghttps://t.co/tQsb4PopTG
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) November 19, 2025
What the Regime Is Trying to Prevent
The December 16 court session was not really about absent defendants; it was about criminalizing organization at the very moment the regime worries the country’s stacked crises could tip into the street. The judiciary used the hearing to press Europe to constrict the Resistance’s media reach—including Simaye Azadi’s satellite footprint—because the regime understands that a restive society becomes harder to contain when it can see itself, communicate, and sustain momentum.
Paired with constant warnings from state officials, heightened readiness, expanded surveillance, and anti-protest posture—the picture is consistent: the regime is running propaganda, censorship pressure, and pre-positioned coercion in parallel, reinforced by executions used as deterrence. This is not the behavior of a confident system; it is a regime trying to prevent hardship from becoming an organized uprising.