Tens of thousands of people took to the streets for former Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s funeral procession in Tehran. They chanted against the United States and Israel, carrying portraits of the killed supreme leader, and calling for vengeance against President Donald Trump.
Still, big crowds under authoritarian regimes should never be confused with popular support for said regimes. The Islamic Republic has spent decades using public gatherings to manufacture the image of national unity. Funerals, anniversary marches, and anti-American rallies do bring out genuine loyalists, but they largely mobilize the state’s patronage networks: civil servants, students, religious institutions, security-linked families, provincial officials, and rent seekers whose access to jobs, financial stability, or protection depends on staying close to power. In such a system, showing up can be an act of belief, but more likely calculation or self-preservation.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij militia function as a social architecture of control, tying jobs, subsistence access, opportunities, and personal safety to political conformity. A regime does not need everyone to believe in it to survive. Iran has more than 90 million people. Even if only 10% of the country forms a hard loyalist base, that is roughly 9 million people, more than enough to fill squares, and make dissenters look isolated. Especially when dissent leads to torture and murder.
That gap between state spectacle and reality is also visible in the polling. Surveys inside Iran have to be treated with caution because fear shapes what people are willing to say. Online surveys can overrepresent more connected and politically active Iranians. Still, the available data do not support the image of a pro-regime society. Netherlands-based Iranian independent research institute’s GAMAAN’s 2024 political preferences survey found that around 70% of Iranians oppose continuation of the Islamic Republic. Support for the principles of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the supreme leader had fallen to 11%, while 66% opposed government based on religious law and 71% oppose military rule. The 2020 religion survey found that 58% of respondents said they did not believe in the hijab at all, while around 72% opposed the compulsory hijab and only 15% supported making it a legal obligation.
GAMAAN’s survey after the 12-day war found that 63% of respondents described the conflict as a war between Israel and the Islamic Republic, not the Iranian people. Sixty-nine percent said Tehran should stop calling for Israel’s destruction. At the same time, 73% said civilian casualties deeply upset them, and nearly half were distressed by direct attacks on Iranian territory. A University of Maryland/CISSM survey showed that the war appears to have made many Iranians more nationalist, an understandable response in a country attacked from outside, including strong distrust of Trump, even as most of its citizens remain opposed to the regime ruling it.
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So, yes, the funeral shows that the Islamic Republic still has its hard-line supporters and a mobilization machine.
But if crowds are evidence of public opinion, then the stronger evidence is the Iranians who took to the streets on their own against this system, even after the regime killed, jailed, and tortured tens of thousands to stop them. Those people have not disappeared. And if so many were willing to risk everything in the open, many more almost certainly shared the same anger in private. That is the better measure of where Iranian society stands.