Three-minute read
In a few late-November days, some of the clerical regime’s most senior insiders did something the system usually avoids: they said out loud that things are going wrong. The intelligence minister warned that “the enemy” is now targeting Ali Khamenei from inside the country. The president and the parliament speaker both admitted that the country is being run the wrong way, even as MPs and state media lined up to attack the president himself. This is not reformist introspection. It is crisis management inside a closed system that is trying to shift blame without touching the man at the top.
A Security Doctrine Built Around One Man
On Sunday, November 23, 2025, Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib travelled to Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province and, according to IRGC-linked coverage, laid out a sharpened threat narrative. He claimed that foreign powers have moved from “overthrow and disintegration” to “containment through intensifying pressure,” and admitted that “hostile attacks” on the supreme leader now echo “inside the country.” The central problem, in his telling, is not drought, mismanagement or corruption, but criticism aimed at the person he called “the pole and axis of this tent.”
Khatib described Khamenei as the source of “unity, victory, progress, steadfastness and resistance,” and warned that anyone who targets him with words should be treated as an infiltrator—“consciously” or “unconsciously” serving the enemy. In this framing, internal dissent is not a signal of regime failure but an intelligence challenge. The more the system fragments, the more its managers insist that only the security services can decide who is loyal and who is an “agent.”
The Fissures of 'Consensus': Anatomy of a Political Crisis in #Tehranhttps://t.co/a6wUvA8pvY
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) November 21, 2025
On Thursday, November 20, 2025, in Qazvin, in remarks carried by state television, the regime’s president Masoud Pezeshkian slipped into the now-familiar performance that irritates much of the ruling elite. He opened with full ritual obedience—blessings for Ruhollah Khomeini, praise for the “martyrs,” and prayers for Ali Khamenei’s “long and blessed” life—then immediately pivoted to listing the regime’s own crises as if he were standing outside of them. Local managers, he said, had told him that about 90% of the province’s water comes from wells and that groundwater is falling roughly 1.5 meters a year. “It’s finished,” he warned. “What are we going to do?” He admitted that costly projects such as the bridge and restoration works at Lake Urmia had “wasted our money” and years of effort, leaving the lake still dry.
Pezeshkian went further on responsibility, but in a way that also distances him from the sinking ship: “If there is a problem, it is us. If people are dissatisfied, we are the ones to blame. We are the ones governing.” He complained that “90–95%” of the research the state funds ends up “on the shelf.” In practice, this style of lament—naming failures while presenting himself as a frustrated insider—has already drawn fire from regime figures like Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, who publicly told him not to “play the role of victim.” Official data and even regime-adjacent analytics tend to understate the gravity of the crisis, but even when a president names mismanagement, he does it in a way that implies he understood the problems all along and that others refused to listen.
Parliament speaker Mohammad-Baqer Ghalibaf, speaking on November 21 to Basij members at Khomeini’s mausoleum, struck the same note from the other power pole. He quoted Khamenei’s line that “everyone is Basiji in this country unless they declare otherwise,” called the Basij “the manifestation of the greatness of the nation and the effective internal force of our country,” and then, “as an official aware of statistics and methods,” conceded: “Our method of administration is not correct and proper. There must be a transformation.”
#Iran’s Clerical Regime Braces for Unrest as Crises Convergehttps://t.co/DTW801sJoV
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) November 15, 2025
Blame, Threats, and the Battle to Police Loyalty
Meanwhile, other insiders are weaponizing the crisis. MP Kamran Ghazanfari described how he warned Pezeshkian that if he does not dismiss his first vice-president, Mr. Aref, and his executive vice-president, Mr. Qaem-Panah—because their children allegedly hold dual citizenship—parliament will file a criminal complaint against him with the judiciary.
State media and former MPs have opened additional fronts. The outlet Rouydad 24 mocked Pezeshkian’s talk of “life without oil,” abolishing household gas and ending power cuts with the headline: “Mr. Pezeshkian! Solve the water and electricity problem; we did not ask for life without oil.”
A former MP Mahmoud Sadeghi accused the cabinet of trying to cancel the title deed for 60 hectares of land belonging to Tarbiat Modares University in order to hand it to the police—a reminder that even this supposedly “moderate” government is deeply entangled with the security apparatus.
#Iran Elites Warn of Unrest as Fuel Hikes and FX Reset Ignite Infighting https://t.co/UNktmnSmzy
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) November 10, 2025
The pattern is simple: the harder the ground gets under the regime’s feet, the more its bulls go at each other’s horns. Khatib brands any criticism of Khamenei as foreign infiltration; Safar-Harandi waves the red lines; Pezeshkian and Qalibaf confess that “the method of administration is wrong” while clinging to Basij and mosque rule; MPs and regime media tear into the president but never touch the source of “general policies.”
This is not an opening, it is a panic. When every official rushes to say “the problems are real, but they are not my fault,” the net effect is to confirm what society already suspects: that the crisis is systemic, not personal. The more they distance themselves from the sinking ship, the clearer it becomes to people that the only real way out is to get rid of the vessel itself, not just its current crew.