Iran’s Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi Has Become Indispensable to the Country’s Opposition

Reza Pahlavi was born in a time of tumult. His father, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, stood at one of the most traumatic junctures of his long reign, which began in 1941. In the five years before and after his son’s birth on Oct. 31, 1960, the Shah remarried—driven by dynastic anxiety and the urgent need for a crown prince—while confronting mounting economic pressures and accelerating social change. He was on the cusp of launching the White Revolution, a program of reforms that would irreversibly alter the fabric of Iranian society: land redistribution, women’s enfranchisement, educational expansion, and the systematic weakening of traditional hierarchies.

Opposition to these changes—especially land reform and the political empowerment of women—coalesced around a hitherto obscure cleric, Ruhollah Khomeini, who mobilized street violence and religious populism to challenge the reforms. It was in this cauldron of expectation and anxieties that the Shah’s new wife, Queen Farah, gave birth to a son. They named him Reza and almost immediately anointed him crown prince.

Opposition to these changes—especially land reform and the political empowerment of women—coalesced around a hitherto obscure cleric, Ruhollah Khomeini, who mobilized street violence and religious populism to challenge the reforms. It was in this cauldron of expectation and anxieties that the Shah’s new wife, Queen Farah, gave birth to a son. They named him Reza and almost immediately anointed him crown prince.

Less than two decades later, that same cleric would overthrow the monarchy and erect an absolutist theocracy in its place. But history, with its occasional macabre ironies, was not finished. With the Islamic Republic now facing an unprecedented threat to its continued existence, in the form of a broad-based nationwide protest movement, Reza has emerged as the most widely embraced symbol of its political future.

Some dismiss Reza’s rising popularity as mere nostalgia. It could just as plausibly be read as defiance among the young—a cosmopolitan, digitally fluent generation furious at the tragic choices imposed on them by history—and basic remorse among older Iranians.

When his father died in exile in Egypt, Reza began what has now become a decades-long odyssey. He had options, but he chose the road less traveled. Like certain scions of fallen dynasties, he could have chosen a life of cultivated leisure—or worse, of parasitic frivolity. He could have monetized his royal status through celebrity, spectacle, or entrepreneurial accumulation.

He chose none of these. Instead, he embarked on an almost Sisyphean task: to cohere a fractured, despairing, and deeply divided Iranian diaspora into something resembling a political coalition.

Along this arduous road, he initially sought counsel not from courtiers but from seasoned men of letters and politics—figures such as Ahmad Ghoreishi, once a university rector, and Hormoz Hekmat, one of the singular intellectuals of his generation. He reached across ideological divides, seeking allies from monarchists, liberals, nationalists, social democrats, and secular leftists alike. At the time, the goal was to muster all forces into a unified voice to take the message of the Iranian people and news of their struggles to the world.

Based in Washington and Paris, he traveled widely and gave talks in small or big gatherings of Iranians of all backgrounds. He was seen as a unifier. His small office at the time seemed merely a center for organizing his meetings. There were different organizations with different and sometimes differing allegiances that claimed to be close to him—each harboring their own agendas. He courted them all while also distancing himself from them. Occasionally, he would emphatically declare that he did not support the use of harsh words, and harsh tactics, in silencing those who might not fully support a royal restoration agenda. His radical supporters were dismayed by these declarations, and his detractors still say he did not do enough to put an end to such behavior.

He endured derision from the clerical regime, including Khomeini’s dismissive attempt to belittle him as a “mini-mini-Pahlavi.” Yet he stayed the course.

As the failures of the Islamic Republic accumulated—its dogmatic rigidity, economic incompetence, systemic corruption, and imperial adventurism—the political landscape began to shift. In the last 20 years, the regime was increasingly criticized at home for being more invested in underwriting repression abroad—spending tens of billions of dollars to sustain the Assad dictatorship or to arm proxies in Lebanon—than in addressing the basic needs of its own people. As the regime steadily lost legitimacy, in demonstrations in Iran occasional shouts in favor of the crown prince’s grandfather—Reza Shah—began to be heard. Those early slogans were the first populist display of a new revisionism about the Pahlavi era. Scholars had long ago started this process.

Against this backdrop, Reza Pahlavi began to benefit from a reflected reassessment of his grandfather’s and father’s record: Reza Shah, who after a coup in 1921 inherited a failed state, and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who came to power in 1941 and by 1978 presided over one of the fastest-growing economies in the developing world.

The Pahlavi family vacations in St. Moritz, Switzerland, on Feb. 5, 1972, seven years before their exile from Iran. Reza is second from left.Michel Ginfray/Sygma via Getty Images

Equally significant in this historic revisionism was the growing stature of the crown prince’s mother, Farah, whose dignity in the face of exile, bereavement, and relentless vilification acquired an almost mythic quality. She earned recognition as a patron of culture and builder of institutions, spearheading programs for Iranian children and assembling one of the most remarkable collections of modern art in the non-Western world: Picassos, Pollocks, Rothkos. Once derided as extravagances, these works—still hidden in museum basements in Tehran as “decadent” relics—are now cherished whenever displayed and valued at as much as $5 billion.

Together, the reassessment of the Pahlavi era and the lived catastrophe of clerical rule produced a generational reckoning. Three generations of Iranians have now lived under the Procrustean constraints of an anachronistic theocracy anchored in centuries-old values, governed by an incestuous elite of aged ideologues and their rapacious offspring. Iran, meanwhile, remains a young society, animated by assertive women and men unwilling to accept the status quo.

These younger generations, beginning with the Green Revolution in 2009, mounted successive waves of protest against the Islamic regime. These culminated in the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. Reza was not a central figure in these protests, but he did respond to them, consciously surrounding himself with a younger cohort of advisors, activists, and organizers—individuals shaped less by exile politics than by the lived realities and new ideologies.

More than once, when asked what form of government he envisioned after the fall, he would say the form of government must be seen as secondary to the nature of the regime. That must be determined by the people, but its essence must be popular sovereignty, gender equality, and human rights.

From the outset of his democratic activism, Reza’s base of support was necessarily heterogeneous and often discordant. On one end stood die-hard royalists, some advocating a restorationist vision anchored in dynastic authority. On the other were secular democrats of various persuasions who saw him not as a future monarch but as a unifying civic figure. Initially, the coalition’s purpose was modest but vital: to amplify the voices of Iranians demanding freedom, dignity, and accountable government.

As repression intensified in recent years and the demand for change hardened into a call for regime change, Reza’s role evolved. Gradually—and not without resistance—he came to be seen as a figure capable of cohering a vast coalition inside and outside Iran to manage what many now regard as the inevitable collapse of clerical despotism.

He is not without detractors. Some point to the militancy of a subset of his royalist supporters and to their insistence on ideological fealty; they see these as ominous portents. Others invoke the traumatic memory of 1979 and warn of a replay of Khomeini’s bait-and-switch. In the months before coming to power, in all his interviews, Khomeini promised a democratic republic modeled on the French Fifth Republic. Once he took Iran, he created a despotism akin to Jerome Savonarola’s short-lived theocracy in Renaissance Florence.

These concerns are not frivolous, but they do not present a doomed scenario. Iran today is not the Iran of 1979. The sustained struggle for democracy, the pluralism of opposition forces, and the prudence embedded in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement make a successful dictatorial power grab less likely. Khomeini, moreover, had a long and sordid record of explicitly anti-democratic ideas well before the revolution, cynically masked only in its final months. Despotism was not an accident of his rule; it was its animating principle.

Reza’s record points in the opposite direction. For nearly four decades, he has worked—often frustratingly, sometimes ineffectively, but consistently—with others, subordinating personal authority to coalition-building.

Reza Pahlavi speaks at a news conference in Paris on June 23, 2025, shortly after U.S. airstrikes destroyed Iran’s major nuclear facilities.Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images

Reza’s repeated efforts to distance himself from such tendencies have not persuaded all critics. Yet a larger number of Iranians, in Iran and in the diaspora, have come to regard him as the most credible unifying figure on the horizon. A poll by Gamaan, a respected polling organization based in the Netherlands, puts his support at about a third, with similar numbers opposed or undecided. There is no one else on the Iranian political landscape who is even close to this approval rating.

Crucially, Reza has articulated—again and again—that he does not seek power for its own sake. He has described his role as explicitly transitional: to help shepherd Iran from the wreckage of the Islamic Republic toward a democratic, secular order whose final shape will be determined not by him, or by any dynasty or faction, but by the freely expressed will of the Iranian people. In a political culture scarred by absolutism—monarchical and clerical alike—this insistence matters.

If Iran is indeed approaching a moment of reckoning, it will require not a savior but a facilitator, not a redeemer but a figure capable of trust-building across deep divides. In that narrow but indispensable space, Reza has positioned himself not as Iran’s ruler but as its custodian for a passage between political eras. Should that moment arrive, it is increasingly difficult to imagine a transition in Iran without such a role for him.