"How do ordinary people become political opponents in an authoritarian state?" Based on in-depth interviews with ten Saudi men and women dissidents, this paper explores the reasons for opposing the Saudi regime in the period following the appointment of Mohammed bin Salman as the Saudi regime's crown prince. It is noteworthy that many Saudi citizens decided to leave Saudi Arabia and organize opposition to the Saudi regime since the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. This paper explores the dynamics of growth of political opposition in relationship to changing styles of rule, power structure, conceptions of legitimacy, and the cost of repression. I argue that indiscriminate repression contributed to increasing the degree of solidarity with victims of political repression, leading some “ordinary people” to acquire a new identity as political opponents. According to the political process theory, when the regime becomes closed, the ability to mobilize will decrease, but the opposite seems to be happening in this case. In this light, the paper explores how when the governing system was relatively more open (between 2010 and 2015), the opposition was less mobilized but became more mobilized when the governing system became more closed after 2015.