Nothing says "everything is fine" quite like your own government's secret poll revealing that 91% of the population would like things to be very, very different. That is essentially what a confidential report prepared for Iran's presidency found, and it is now out in the wild for everyone to enjoy.
As Trending Politics reported, the classified document titled "What Iran Wants" was compiled by Ali Rabiei, the social adviser to President Masoud Pezeshkian. According to IranWire, which obtained the report on July 13, the polling was conducted by the Ara Opinion Research Center in May 2026 and circulated among governing institutions in June. The results are, to put it gently, not great for the people in charge.
Only 9% of respondents wanted to keep the current system as is. Another 53% backed major structural reforms, and over 19% wanted the whole political system replaced entirely. So roughly three quarters of the country is somewhere between "fix this" and "burn it down and start over." For context, that 9% approval rate means the Islamic Republic is less popular among its own citizens than airline middle seats.
The emotional state of the Iranian public is equally grim. About 64% reported persistent anger, up 12 points from a previous government survey in December 2025. Half felt hopeless. Nearly half reported sadness or depression. And about 45% said they lived with ongoing fear or anxiety. Over 81% reported severe or partial difficulty just obtaining enough food, and 75% struggled to afford medical care. Only 8% earned enough to save any money at all.
Miad Maleki, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital the numbers actually understate the problem. "If anything, this research understates the depth of Iranians' rage," he said, noting that anger levels above 63% exceed anything Gallup has ever recorded anywhere on the planet. He added that in a police state, people self-censor, meaning the findings represent "a floor, not a ceiling."
Perhaps the most inconvenient detail for Tehran is where citizens point the finger. Nearly 47% blamed government inefficiency for economic troubles, 26.3% blamed corruption, and only 20.7% cited foreign sanctions. So the regime's favorite excuse of blaming the West is not exactly landing with the home crowd.
And what did the report recommend in response to this five alarm fire? Better messaging. Rabiei suggested state institutions explain sanctions more effectively, moderate official rhetoric, and make state television look more inclusive. IranWire's analysis noted the recommendations treated the crisis as a communications problem rather than proposing any actual political or economic reform. It is the governmental equivalent of putting a fresh coat of paint on a collapsing building.
Maleki pointed out that anti-government protests have expanded from over 80 cities in 2017 to more than 200 cities across all 31 provinces this year, with a fourfold increase in strikes. "Iranians have moved from being skeptical of what another revolution might bring to concluding there is no alternative to one, because reform has proven impossible," he said.
Still, he offered a sobering caveat. "This regime was born of revolution, by revolutionaries. Preventing and crushing the next one is the one thing they genuinely know how to do."
It is worth noting the survey methodology was not included in the leaked materials, so the findings cannot be independently verified. But when your own pollsters are delivering numbers this catastrophic, the methodology almost feels beside the point.
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