This rallying cry is alluring for many of the 4 million Iranian exiles and expats worldwide, just under a third of whom live in the U.S., according to Iranian Foreign Ministry statistics from 2021.
“If change does come, the only path that offers both stability and a sense of national continuity is through Pahlavi,” said Amin, 38, an Iranian now living in Canada who declined to give his second name or exact location because of fear of speaking out against the regime even from abroad.
There is a disagreement among experts about Pahlavi’s popularity inside Iran itself.
A 2022 study by Gamaan, a Dutch-based research group, gauged Pahlavi’s domestic popularity at 39%, far more than then-Prime Minister Ebrahim Raisi, in second with 17%, and imprisoned Nobel Peace laureate Narges Mohammadi on 15%.
“He is the only national figure inside Iran with cross-generational, cross-class, and cross-ethnic legitimacy,” one prominent Iranian diaspora account on X, @upuouo, said last week.
Other contenders abroad include the dissident group Mujahedeen e-Khalq, more commonly known as the MEK, which has gained high-profile supporters including the former New York mayor and Trump ally Rudy Giuliani. But MEK, widely seen by Western experts as a cult, has negligible support inside Iran thanks to its backing for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88.
Critics of Pahlavi see him as the pro-Western figurehead of a dynasty that took power in the 1920s aided by the British, cemented its grip with help from the CIA, and is only poised for a return following airstrikes by Israel and the U.S.
Amin Aghdasi, 30, from Tehran, described him as “a coward who betrays his nation” and someone waiting “for power to be handed to him.” Pahlavi “thinks a war criminal like Bibi can help bring back his monarchy,” Aghdasi added, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
NBC News has requested comment from Pahlavi’s media team, both on concerns about his familial ties to his father’s legacy, and the decision to use preselected questions at his news conference.
Some analysts are also skeptical of polling inside Iran, where some opinions can lead to jail or worse.
“There’s been a real push to get Pahlavi to be seen as a credible opposition figure in Iran, but my sense is he’s not,” said Dina Esfandiary, the Middle East geoeconomics lead for Bloomberg Economics, Bloomberg’s internal research division. “He’s got a following outside of the country,” but “honestly, inside Iran, not that much. He hasn’t been inside the country in over 40 years” and many “people believe his family is the reason why Iran is where it is today.”
She agrees there are few good options.
“That’s one of the reasons why the Iranian people, while they want change, are afraid of it, because they have nobody to coalesce around,” she said. Any lasting solution, she thinks, would “need Iranians to work together and to present a viable opposition.”
One reason that’s not been possible domestically is Iran’s crushing of successive protest movements with deadly force. Most notably the Green Movement of 2009, in which marchers railed against that year’s rigged election, and the mass outcry over the death of Mahsa Amini following her detention for not following female headscarf laws in 2022.
In Paris, Pahlavi sought to portray himself as a model of openness and selflessness who would help birth a new peaceful and democratic era in Iran, perhaps along the lines of Spain’s King Juan Carlos I who helped dismantle the authoritarian regime of Francisco Franco and establish a parliamentary monarchy.
Though he was reluctant to give a formal name to the transitional role he might play — saying “I don’t believe I need a title” — he was unequivocal about his message to the ayatollah.
“Step down,” he said down the barrel of the camera. “If you do, you will receive a fair trial and due process of law — which is more than you have ever given any Iranian.”
