An analytical reflection: from the wound of the name “republic” to the impasse of the form of power

“The principle of republican government is virtue.”
— Charles de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws

Why don’t republicans have a single leader or a widely recognized figure?

This question has been raised repeatedly in recent days—sometimes as criticism, sometimes as expectation. Monarchists, royalists, and segments of nationalist forces often deploy it as a rhetorical device to cast doubt on the political viability of republicans and to arrive at a simplistic conclusion:

“They have no face, therefore they do not exist.”

Many of us know this is merely a linguistic sophism, not a description of reality on the ground. Nevertheless, republicans face serious challenges. Among them is the fact that the Islamic Republic, in one of the most successful operations of semantic subversion in modern Iranian history, not only appropriated but morally contaminated the term “republic,” alongside concepts such as justice, freedom, dignity, homeland, mobilization, revolution, reform, and many others.

In its minimal sense, republicanism seeks a political order in which the source of legitimacy and power lies in the free, fair, and periodic choice of citizens—not in bloodline, religion, or charisma. Within this horizon, political pluralism and the right to dissent are guaranteed; tolerance toward dissidents and sexual minorities is the rule rather than the exception; social justice entails reducing class and regional inequalities; and gender justice requires full legal equality and meaningful participation of women and gender minorities at all levels of power.

At the same time, democratic republicanism commits itself to recognizing the nations and national groups within Iran, their linguistic and cultural rights, and to designing an order based on decentralization of power—an order that distributes authority between national and regional/local levels in a way that preserves political unity while preventing the reproduction of center-over-periphery domination.

However, the Islamic Republic tied a name that, in modern political tradition, should signify popular sovereignty, accountability, and the possibility of dismissing power, to an apparatus of exclusion, execution, securitization, and religious guardianship. For many today, “republic” no longer evokes emancipation, but rather a new form of an old despotism.

This inversion was not accidental. It was the result of a deliberate program to control the future. Political thought teaches us that totalizing power, in order to dominate the future, first corrupts the language of the future—emptying or contaminating the signifiers meant to carry the new.

The core misunderstanding begins here. Despite its republican vocabulary, the Islamic Republic was not a “bad” or incomplete republic. It was a particular form of totalizing authoritarianism with quasi-monarchical characteristics, using the name “republic” as a cloak of legitimacy. What has been experienced structurally is not the logic of republicanism, but the logic of concentrated power, lack of accountability, the primacy of appointed and security institutions over public will, and the transformation of elections into rituals affirming the system’s will.

Thus, the public discrediting of “republic” is not the failure of an idea, but the success of a falsification.

On such wounded ground, Iranian republicans face a double challenge. On one hand, they must fight the existing despotism; on the other, they must rescue the concept of “republic” from beneath the rubble of the Islamic Republic’s experience. Performing both tasks simultaneously is difficult and costly. A movement forced to remain in constant semantic defense will inevitably reach institutional action more slowly.

Part of the absence of a “single face” or unified representation among republicans stems from this permanent defensive posture at the level of language.

From this perspective, Iranian republicanism remains more a negative position—the rejection of religious despotism and hereditary monarchy—than an institutionalized affirmative project. Under the umbrella of republicanism gather diverse intellectual and historical currents: followers of Mossadegh, leftists, secular human-rights advocates, liberal democrats, ethnic/national movements, women’s organizations, grassroots activists, and parties in exile.

This diversity is not inherently a flaw; indeed, it can signal vitality. The problem arises when, under conditions of repression, plurality fails to translate into operational unity through intermediary institutions, and instead remains fragmented at the level of identities, statements, and dispersed networks.

A decisive philosophical point emerges here: if republicanism is to remain genuinely republican, it is suspicious of charisma and personality-centered leadership. Iran’s political experience has reinforced this suspicion: every “spokesperson” can quickly become a “guardian,” every “representative” can transform representation into the confiscation of collective will.

The difficulty arises when this justified fear, instead of leading to the invention of anti-charismatic forms of representation, results in the suspension of representation itself. Modern politics is impossible without representation; what can be changed is its form, not its principle.

Iranian republicans are caught precisely here: they wish to be anti-authoritarian, yet they have not sufficiently rendered an anti-authoritarian institutional form intelligible, practicable, and trustworthy.

For this reason, republicanism often turns to charters and coalitions. These seek to fill the absence of a single face with a “collective text” and “agreed principles.” Examples include coalitions such as “Hamgami for a Secular Democratic Republic” and the “Joint Congress of Democratic and Federal Democratic Republicans,” formed to strengthen secular, charter-based republican forces.

These efforts are important. Yet a charter, as long as it merely articulates positions without creating mechanisms for decision-making, division of responsibilities, and practical commitment, does not generate representation. A coalition produces representation only when it can produce decisions—not merely positions.

A second structural knot concerns center and periphery. If republicanism is to create unified representation, it must clarify on behalf of which “we” it speaks. In a multilingual and multinational Iran, no “we” can become a subject of representation without addressing the distribution of power, language rights, and equal participation.

Monarchists, by contrast, benefit from a symbolic shortcut: one name, one face, one simplified narrative of a glorious past and a bright future. Republicans must take the more difficult path—unity from below, respect for difference, institution-building, and preservation of complexity.

The solution is not to construct a “single leader,” but to invent “limited and recallable representation.” Instead of a permanent spokesperson, mission-based spokespersons; instead of vague councils, temporary and accountable institutions; instead of maximalist identity charters, a few minimal binding principles capable of producing decisions and transforming disagreement into a mechanism of resolution rather than fragmentation.

Above all, republicans must show that the desired republic is not a purified name, but a set of locks placed on power: the lock of separation of powers, the lock of a free press, the lock of judicial independence, the lock of equal linguistic and civic rights, the lock of decentralization, and the lock of financial and organizational transparency.

A real republic is not the moment when people vote once; it is an order in which they can constrain power in their daily lives.

Until this distinction becomes clear—in language, in organization, and in institutional design—republicanism may remain morally justified but will not become historically and politically effective. In politics, moral correctness that does not take institutional form eventually turns into ineffectiveness.