For several weeks, protests have been multiplying in Iran, revealing the scale of a popular rejection that does not weaken despite forty seven years of brutal repression. The mullahs still rule by fear, but no longer govern by consent. Youth, women, workers and ethnic minorities are converging in a massive protest that now goes beyond economic demands to target the very heart of the regime.
Faced with this internal storm, Tehran can count on few credible allies. Assad’s Syria is no longer more than a shadow of itself, Lebanese Hezbollah is weakened, and regional proxies struggle to hide Iran’s strategic erosion. In this landscape of defeats, Algiers stands out as one of the last openly declared political partners of the Islamic Republic.
The Algerian military regime, born of a system locked by the army since independence, shares with Tehran the same obsession: survival at any cost. Like the mullahs, the Algerian generals govern without a real popular mandate, stifle all opposition, criminalize peaceful protest and instrumentalize external causes to divert attention from their own internal failures.
Two peoples, one same anger
In Tehran as in Algiers, the scenario looks dangerously similar. In Iran, the theocracy is collapsing under the weight of corruption, social injustice and institutionalized violence. In Algeria, military power is still trying to contain a society deeply marked by the Hirak, whose demands have never disappeared, despite repression, arbitrary arrests and media lockdown.
In both cases, the regimes survive by criminalizing dissent, manipulating the justice system and presenting themselves as artificial bulwarks against a chaos they themselves created. But this strategy has reached its limits. Iranian revolutionary ideology as well as the Algerian pseudo nationalist narrative no longer mobilize. They ring hollow in the face of young, connected, aware and determined populations.
Growing international isolation
On the geopolitical level, Iran is increasingly isolated. Western sanctions, regional setbacks and the erosion of its influence have turned the Islamic Republic into a defensive actor, clinging to its remaining gains. Algeria, for its part, multiplies aggressive diplomatic postures to mask its strategic decline and its inability to offer a credible project to its population.
The rapprochement between Algiers and Tehran looks less like an alliance of strength than a solidarity between besieged regimes, each seeking in the other a reassuring mirror of its own authoritarianism. But history is relentless: when peoples rise up, pacts between tyrannies are never enough to stop the course of events.
Translated from Abderrazzak Boussaid’s French article – le7tv