The spark and the meaning of a slogan

On 16 September 2022, the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman detained in Tehran by the morality police for allegedly violating hijab regulations, triggered the largest popular mobilisation in Iran since the Green Movement in 2009. The reconstruction of the events, disputed by authorities and family members, was followed and documented by organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which denounced excessive use of force and repression of the demonstrations that followed.

According to data from the independent organisation Iran Human Rights, between September 2022 and the first months of 2023, the repression caused over 500 deaths, including at least 70 minors, and more than 20,000 arrests. Among the cases that have had the greatest international echo are those of Nika Shakarami and Sarina Esmailzadeh, both 16 years old, who became symbols of the human cost of the protest.

The slogan ‘Zan, Zendegi, Azadi’ – Woman, Life, Freedom – already present in the tradition of Kurdish movements, became in a few weeks the shared language of a protest that went beyond the single issue of the veil to invest the relationship between the individual and public power. The images of women cutting their hair or removing the hijab in public spaces were not the denial of a religious faith, but the contestation of a specific political system: the Islamic Republic founded in 1979, in which religious interpretation is incorporated into the institutional architecture.

This distinction is crucial. Islam, like any great religious tradition, knows plurality of schools and practices. The Iranian order represents a particular politico-religious configuration, not the only possible declination of the Islamic experience.

Repression, society, generations

According to data from the NGO Iran Human Rights, reported by Reuters and the BBC, the repression between 2022 and 2023 resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands of arrests. Several protesters were tried on charges related to national security; in some cases, death sentences were handed down, prompting reactions from European institutions. Among the first executions linked to the protests was that of Mohsen Shekari in December 2022. The Evin prison in Tehran has become a symbol of this season, with the detention of activists, journalists and students.

Yet the crisis cannot be read only as a clash between the square and the apparatus. Iran is a young country (over 60% of the population is under 35 years old according to official demographic data) with a high level of female schooling: women account for around 55-60% of those enrolled in Iranian universities. Universities have for years recorded a strong presence of female students in the scientific and humanistic faculties. The divide is also generational and social: a significant part of society is demanding greater personal autonomy and spaces for participation in an institutional system shaped in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution.

The mobilisations recorded in early 2025 and 2026 were not mere echoes of 2022. In terms of intensity and repressive response, they were among the bloodiest in recent years in Iran. The protests, triggered by new tightening of social controls but amplified by economic and political demands, have shown a discontent that goes beyond the original perimeter of ‘Woman, Life, Liberty’.

If the 2022 movement had focused on the body and women’s autonomy as a symbolic detonator, the 2026 demonstrations revealed a broader crisis: youth unemployment, inflation, international isolation, institutional distrust. Not a replacement of the original movement, but its evolution. Women remain the moral and symbolic focus of the mobilisation, but the protest has turned into a more comprehensive contestation of the Islamic Republic’s model of government.

In this sense, ‘Woman, Life, Liberty’ is no longer just a slogan: it has become the ethical code of a generation calling for a redefinition of the relationship between citizen and state.

Europe between principles and interests

In Europe, the protests generated a broad wave of solidarity. The European Parliament passed condemnatory resolutions and the EU adopted targeted sanctions packages against Iranian officials and security-related bodies on the grounds of violations of fundamental rights. In 2023, the European Parliament awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement and the memory of Mahsa Amini, recognising its symbolic and political value.

But Iran is not only the scene of an internal crisis. It is a central player in the nuclear dossier, inGulf security, in relations with Russia and China , and in energy balances.

Chatham House and other institutions of geopolitical analysis have emphasised how every European choice towards Tehran is intertwined with long-term strategic interests.

It is in this space that the knot of so-called European ‘dualism’ is located. Not only on a political level, but above all on a cultural one. While on the institutional level the Union has taken concrete measures, in the European public and academic debate there sometimes emerges a caution that appears selective. Iranian repression is denounced, but rarely included in a broader reflection on the systemic nature of the political model that produces it.

The fear of fuelling Islamophobic narratives or slipping into culturalist readings has generated, in some intellectual circles, a form of caution that risks becoming reticence. The distinction between Islam as a religion and the Islamic Republic as a political system – correct and necessary – sometimes results in a difficulty in naming the problem in its institutional dimension.

There is thus a predominantly symbolic solidarity: slogans, cultural initiatives, public demonstrations. Less frequent, however, is an in-depth discussion of the legal and constitutional implications of the claims made by Iranian women. The risk is that support remains confined to the moral register, without translating into a coherent analysis of the power structures that those claims call into question.

A substantial part of the European debate has its roots in 1979, the year of the revolution led by Khomeini. In a context marked by the tarnishing of the image of the USSR – after Budapest, Prague and the intervention in Afghanistan – some circles of the international left looked to revolutionary Iran as a possible alternative laboratory of resistance to western hegemony.

That reading, matured at a time of strong ideological polarisation, contributed to building a narrative of political Islam as an anti-imperialist subject, rather than as an institutional project to be evaluated in its internal implications.

From that cultural season derive, in part, certain contemporary ambivalences: the difficulty in distinguishing between solidarity towards or peoples and critical analysis of systems of power; between opposition to western interventionism and evaluation of internal authoritarian dynamics.

It must be recognised that the reflections of that phase continue to influence a part of European public discourse.

The point is not to ask Europe for an ideological posture, but for cultural coherence. If fundamental rights are defined as universal, their defence cannot be modulated according to the geopolitical context or the sensitivity of internal debate. The maturity of a public space is also measured in the ability to distinguish between respect for religious identities and critical analysis of forms of government.

In this sense, the Iranian case questions not only European diplomacy, but the quality of its public discourse.

Religion and State: the need for distinction

To keep the debate on a rigorous level, it is necessary to separate the religious level from the institutional one. The protests of 2022 were not a theological movement against Islam, but a civil claim against a state apparatus that integrates a specific religious interpretation into its laws.

Very different state models exist in Muslim-majority countries, as numerous comparative studies show. The Iranian experience is historically determined and politically specific. To reduce the crisis to a ‘clash of civilisations’ would be to ignore the internal plurality of Iranian society and the complexity of the contemporary Islamic world.

A question of European interest

Months after the peak of the demonstrations, the movement no longer steadily occupies the headlines, but tensions remain. BBC Persian reports indicate a strengthening of control mechanisms, while the demands that fuelled the protests – individual autonomy, civil rights, participation – continue in the Iranian public debate.

‘Woman, Life, Liberty’ has become an indicator of profound transformations: the role of women in the public space, the relationship between the younger generation and institutions, the redefinition of the balance between religious legitimacy and political representation.

For Europe, the stakes are not symbolic

It concerns the credibility of its foreign policy and the coherence of its regulatory framework, based on respect for human dignity, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law. Geopolitical complexity demands realism; but realism is no substitute for clarity of principles.

More than three years after the start of the movement, ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ is no longer just a street slogan, but a stable reference in the Iranian political lexicon. The protests of 2025-2026 represent its moral continuation: rooted in a social transformation now fed up with the regime’s oppression.

The Iranian affair therefore questions not only Tehran, but also us Europeans: on the ability to combine strategic interests and the protection of rights, but also on the maturity of our own cultural debate. It is in the consistency between words, analyses and public positions that the quality of a political community is measured. ‘Woman, Life, Liberty’ remains, also for Europe, a test: not of rhetoric, but of consistency.