The 2009 Iranian presidential elections were followed by organized, massive street demonstrations under the banner of the Green Movement against the disputed victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The movement was a loose coalition of reformers, moderate conservatives and seculars.

Websites associated with the defeated candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, the former prime minister of Iran (1981-89) and one of the prominent leaders of the Green Movement, claimed that according to leaked information from the Ministry of Interior, the real number of votes were 21.3 million for Mousavi and 10.5 million for Ahmadinejad. It should be noted that a portion of religious conservatives could have voted for Mousavi because until that date his devotion to the Islamic system and velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the jurist), was approved by the ultra-conservative Guardian Council, which vets the candidates, otherwise he could not have run for presidency.

It's then safe to assume that even taking these numbers — which for obvious reasons could be biased in favor of Mousavi — at face value, the conservative power elite that rules Iran and at the time was represented by Ahmadinejad, had at the very least over 10 million supporters. What's important to conclude here is that even based on the numbers given by the Greens, the street demonstrators were representing a faction of society, while the regime also enjoyed sizable support at the time. Therefore, the clashes of 2009 were not simply about the people against the regime. Rather, they were the manifestation of the revival of a struggle within a fragmented society.

The Green Movement's backbone was shaped by the middle- and upper-middle class. This explains why the movement was focused on civil rights and never raised any economic demands. Undoubtedly, the movement represented a sizable faction of a society that sought change as a result of frustration with Ahmadinejad and the system throwing its support behind him. In any event, based on these facts it could be concluded that the 2009 clashes were not about the whole society against the system. Rather, it was the revival of a 100-year-old battle within fragmented Iranian society. On the one side stood modernists; primarily middle- and upper middle-class young urbanites, and on the other side were traditionalists or religious conservatives with no distinctive class, although some observers maintain that mainly the low-income shaped this camp.