Why the Left Has So Little Traction in Iran, by Mina Khanlarzadeh – 8 July 2026

From Mina’s Substack

At a moment when Iran still stands near the edge of war, it may seem almost like a luxury to ask why the Left has so little traction in Iranian society. The destruction and death brought by the recent war are still unfolding: the loss of lives, jobs, infrastructure, health, and the environmental consequences of what was bombed have not yet been fully measured. That this question has to be asked while universities themselves have been bombed only makes it harder, and more necessary. But the question of what to demand of the Islamic Republic, and how to engage with society’s hopes and fears, cannot be postponed until after the crisis. Much of what society demands belongs to the terrain on which the Left should be able to speak with force: labor rights, an end to corruption, free internet access, press freedom, gender justice, an end to executions and political imprisonment, sanctions relief, and a foreign policy built around national interest. Yet none of this has made the Left more popular.

A Problem From Within

Some background may help. During Ahmadinejad’s first presidency, from 2005 to 2009, a younger generation on Iranian campuses helped shape what became known as the younger-generation Left. This was decades after the Islamic Republic’s mass executions of leftists in the late 1980s. The new campus Left emerged from reform-era openings around women’s rights, student organizing, and labor unrest, and from reformism’s failure to give those struggles a more radical language. As Peyman Vahabzadeh shows, one of its most visible formations was Students for Freedom and Equality, or Daneshjuyan-e Azadikhah va Barabaritalab, a loose leftist student network that brought questions of social justice back into campus politics and faced a wave of arrests in December 2007. It opened a cross-generational dialogue with survivors of that earlier destruction, recovering what remained of an older language and building something new from it. For many on campus at the time, that language made it possible to think repression, inequality, and historical violence together.

[READ THE REST]

Mina Khanlarzadeh (Ph.D., Columbia University; B.Sc., Physics, Sharif University of Technology) is a historian whose interdisciplinary work engages global political thought, literary and translation studies, gender studies, and the history of science.

Why the Left Has So Little Traction in Iran, by Mina Khanlarzadeh – 8 July 2026

More content from this blog