Gordon Carrera

And I mean, I visited Iran a bit in the early 2000s at a time when the reformists had the upper hand, where there was more kind of openness.

I mean, I could get a visa, which said something at the time.

You've seen this kind of ebb and flow between the two sides.

But it feels like something has changed, I think, in the last few weeks because it's felt like it's suddenly kind of spinning out of control.

You've had a reformist, actually a more reformist president at the moment who's in power, but who's ended up instituting an absolutely brutally repressive crackdown.

So there's maybe cohesion, but also a kind of instability there, do you think?

Because I think it's true to say that the current president who is at the more reformist liberal end

prevaricated a little bit you know there was some signs he wasn't sure what to do but in the end it looks like on this first kind of pillar elite cohesion in the end the elite cohered around the idea of repression now that may not last but at the moment elite cohesion has not broken because kind of both the more reformist and the hardliner elements have both kind of

effectively signed up for this kind of repression let's look at the next one maybe then which is the second of those pillars was a loyal and effective security forces I mean this is always crucial isn't it when you've got a kind of unstable situation can you rely on your own security forces basically to go out there and shoot protesters you know can you rely on them or when it comes to you know face to face between a security force and its own people do they refuse to to fire and again on this one

It doesn't appear so far as if that's been weakened dramatically, does it?

You don't want one single organization.

It's the classic thing.

You want to kind of a national guard as well as an army so that you can't be overthrown if you're a regime by one group.

So I guess we should say there's there's a kind of law enforcement command, isn't there, which is effectively the kind of national police force, which is.

got different units then you've got the besiege maybe we should explain what those are those are more like a kind of paramilitary civil defense social control kind of quite thuggish aren't they i mean they're the ones who kind of ride around on motorbikes uh breaking up demonstrations that that kind of thing

And then the third one is the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the IRGC, which is distinct from the military itself, but is actually effectively a large military force, but which could be used at home and abroad, I guess.

Yeah, so just to maybe finish off that point about security forces, I guess what we're saying here is they were relatively effective in suppressing the demonstrations and the protests, but there might be some signs of cracks in terms of where people were deployed, and I think that's

Perhaps we'd agree something to watch.

So the next one was opposition.

You know, how coherent is the opposition?