Hardliners hit the streets in Tehran as US–Iran deal takes shape

Demonstrations broke out across Iranian cities on 13 June 2026, with hardline supporters of the conservative line directing chants at Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf over an emerging agreement with the United States. Telegram channels with documented presence in Iran — including englishabuali, abualiexpress, GeoPWatch and wfwitness — began circulating footage and on-the-ground accounts between 19:31 UTC and 20:28 UTC, with protesters in central Tehran chanting insults at Araghchi and calling for the negotiation track to be abandoned. The protests mark the most visible domestic backlash yet to a diplomacy the Iranian government has, until now, framed as a victory of statecraft.

What is unfolding is a familiar-looking intra-elite fracture, but with the polarity reversed: the foreign minister carrying the file is being attacked not by reformists or by the street-based opposition still scarred from the 2022–23 protests, but by hardliners who view any accommodation with Washington as a betrayal of the revolutionary project. The pattern is consistent with how previous nuclear episodes — the 2015 JCPOA and the collapse that followed in 2018 — were contested inside the Islamic Republic: the fight over the deal is, in part, a fight over who speaks for the system.

The shape of the street

The footage catalogued by the four channels on 13 June shares a consistent set of motifs. Demonstrators are chanting against Araghchi by name, accusing him of selling out the country, and — in clips published by GeoPWatch and wfwitness — extending the line of attack to Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Majles and a figure associated with the conservative and former security-services wing of the establishment. The phrase "Death to Araghchi" appears across multiple uploads, alongside variants of "Araghchi, shame on you, leave this country alone," reported by wfwitness in footage shot in central Tehran at approximately 19:31 UTC. The geographic spread suggested by the channels — with reports framed as nationwide rather than confined to a single square — points to coordination through the conservative clerical networks and Friday-prayer infrastructure that have historically mobilised this base.

The targeting matters. Ghalibaf is not a peripheral figure. As speaker, he controls the legislative agenda, and the Majles would have to ratify any binding accord or any new sanctions architecture. Going after him is a signal that the opposition to the deal intends to use the parliament, not just the street, as a veto player. Araghchi, a career diplomat who has carried the nuclear file across multiple governments, is the visible face of the negotiation and therefore the natural target for those who want the file derailed.

The diplomatic backdrop

The protests are being read in the context of an emerging understanding between Tehran and Washington that has not yet been publicly signed but has been telegraphed in instalments over recent weeks. The shape of that understanding, as it has been characterised in regional and wire reporting, involves constraints on enrichment capacity and monitoring access in exchange for sanctions relief and the release of frozen Iranian revenues. Iranian state media has been more cautious in its framing than the protesters, presenting the diplomacy as a defensive success while declining to declare victory. The hardliners now on the street are pushing back against that hedged line, arguing that any agreement that leaves the existing sanctions architecture partially intact — and any concession on enrichment — is a defeat dressed up as a compromise.

The four channels carrying footage today are not aligned with the reformist opposition. englishabuali and abualiexpress have a documented focus on Iran's conservative current and clerical politics; GeoPWatch specialises in Iran and regional security; wfwitness publishes raw on-the-ground footage that frequently surfaces before Western wires. Their decision to lead with hardline demonstrations, rather than with any counter-demonstration by deal supporters, suggests the protest movement is currently the more newsworthy of the two — and that the conservatives' media ecosystem regards the issue as winnable in the court of public opinion.

Why the base fights the deal

Iranian conservatives have three reasons to oppose an accommodation with Washington that go beyond ideology. The first is structural: a deal that delivers sanctions relief strengthens the technocratic, internationally-connected wing of the state — the Foreign Ministry, the negotiating team, parts of the oil and banking establishment — and weakens the political economy of resilience that has benefited the IRGC, the bonyads, and the networks that grew up around sanctions evasion. A normalised economy is, for that constituency, a less controllable economy.

The second is doctrinal. The revolutionary narrative depends on the United States being an enemy in perpetuity; diplomacy that produces an actual agreement tests that narrative in front of constituencies that have organised their lives around it. The 2015 deal was tolerated because it was sold as tactical; an agreement signed under the current regional pressures — with Russia and Hezbollah constrained, and with Iran's proxies under sustained pressure — reads, to the hardline base, as a strategic retreat forced by weakness rather than a manoeuvre of strength.

The third is institutional. The Majles has been a site of conservative resistance to outgoing president Ebrahim Raisi's diplomacy and to the negotiating team of his successor. A serious agreement would require ratification instruments or at minimum a domestic legitimacy that only the parliament can confer. By targeting Ghalibaf directly, the protest movement signals that it intends to make the parliamentary track the deal's hardest obstacle.

Stakes and what remains uncertain

The near-term question is whether the protests harden into a coordinated political block inside the system, or remain a noisy but containable street current. Two indicators will matter: whether Friday prayer leaders in Qom and Mashhad echo the anti-Araghchi line in this week's sermons, and whether the Majles Foreign Policy and National Security Committee moves to summon the foreign minister for questioning on the negotiation's red lines. Either would mark a shift from mobilisation to institutional pressure.

The open variables the sources do not specify are also important. The four channels carry footage and slogans but not the size of the demonstrations; reporting is consistent with a coordinated, organised turnout rather than a mass movement, but the wire has not yet produced crowd counts from the Iranian interior. The contents of the emerging deal itself remain unconfirmed in their specifics — channels refer to it as an "agreement" and a "deal" without publishing text or even a definitive list of agreed parameters, and there is no public confirmation from either the US State Department or the Iranian Foreign Ministry that the document being protested against in the streets is the same one the negotiators believe they have nearly finished.

What is already clear is that the deal's hardest audience is not in Washington, not in Jerusalem, and not in the Gulf. It is in Tehran, and it speaks the foreign minister's name. For a negotiation that has run on the assumption that the Iranian state could deliver its side of a bargain, that is the variable worth watching.

Desk note: Monexus has framed the 13 June demonstrations as a hardline backlash to an emerging US–Iran understanding, with the four Telegram channels treated as the primary wire of record for protest footage from inside Iran. Western agencies have not yet published crowd estimates or confirmed terms; where the channels are the only on-the-ground source, the article attributes the specific chants and footage to them rather than asserting the scale of the protests as an established fact.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/englishabuali
• https://t.me/abualiexpress
• https://t.me/GeoPWatch
• https://t.me/wfwitness