an Iranian Gorbachev to succeed the mullahs’ regime?

Among the hypotheses on the future of Iran after the massacres of January 2026, one cannot be ruled out and could avoid the worst scenarios: a change coming from within the regime, at the initiative of reformers, who would dare to challenge Ayatollah Khamenei. A development that would not happen overnight. Since the beginning of the Islamic Revolution, moderates and radicals have always coexisted in the senior clergy and the armed forces.

Can we then dream of a kind of Mikhail Gorbachev putting an end to the discredited system of the ultraconservatives guilty of a repression – between 20,000 and 35,000 deaths – which cut them off from a large part of the 90 million Iranians? Even if they still have their supporters and their militias, notably the powerful Revolutionary Guard corps.

What alternatives, while there is no structured opposition, leader who unites it? A terrible civil war until exhaustion? American bombings, if Donald Trump gave the order, at the risk of regional chaos? They could decapitate the regime but also provoke a surge in the name of the fight against the “Great Satan” among a very nationalist people. A return of the Pahlavi in ​​the person of Reza, son of the last shah – that of Louis XVIII had led to the Restoration in France in 1815 – is not excluded, but would provoke Islamist resistance.

Trump’s disastrous exit from the 2015 nuclear deal and the tightening of sanctions had reversed the balance in favor of the ultraconservatives while the presidency of Hassan Rouhani gave the Iranians hope of a smooth opening towards the West. The current president Massoud Pezeshkian was himself classified as a reformist when he was elected in 2024. Has he remained so?

Some, at least in the ruling class, are aware that the sanctions are alienating an exhausted population, that Khamenei’s inaction and repressive approach are no longer tenable, and that internal change would be much preferable to civil war and external intervention.