Paul Moss

It started with shopkeepers.

Now Iran's latest protest movement has been taken up by students.

Poverty, corruption, tyranny, death to the dictatorship, they chanted in the capital Tehran.

But Tuesday saw demonstrations reported at 10 universities across the country.

When it comes to facing down protest, Iran's rulers don't usually hold back.

The last major movement in 2022 was perhaps typical.

Security forces opened fire on crowds.

More than 500 people were killed and around 20,000 arrested, according to human rights groups.

This time, though, seems very different, with the Iranian president adopting what certainly sounds like a conciliatory tone.

The government should listen to the protesters' legitimate demands, Massoud Pazeshkian said.

And the Speaker of Iran's parliament, Mohammad Bakhar Ghalibaf, also seemed in a mood to understand rather than condemn.

People's concerns and protests over economic hardships must be responded to with full responsibility and dialogue and taking necessary measures focused on increasing people's purchasing power and reforming the economic decision-making process.

So economic hardship, the government seems to acknowledge, is a reality for many, perhaps most Iranians.

But the list of grievances has now expanded, as I heard when I spoke to Bachman Kalbassi from the BBC's Persian service.

The government, the president, certainly do sound unusually conciliatory talking about the need to understand the protesters' concerns.

What should we read into that?

If we look back at the protests three years ago, those started over the attempts to crack down on women who weren't following strict dress codes.

And since then, women in Iran have actually been flouting these rules far more widely than before.

In some ways, they won in that protest.

And I wonder if that's given a sort of momentum and optimism to the protesters who are out on the streets now.