Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Monday, August 29, 2011

More details on Iranian politics

An analysis in The Economist offers more details about the state of elite politics in Iran.

I'd note that the reference to the water fights broken up (probably by Basiji) neglects to consider that it was the organizing, not the fun, that the rulers feared.

Divine divisions

WHILE the Arab spring unfolds all round them, the (mostly Persian) citizens of Iran seem condemned to a lonely purgatory. Their 1979 revolution promised refuge from the Shah’s roller-coaster rule, but the Islamic Republic that replaced it is beset by an equally secular malaise. A soaring murder rate (the country’s top weightlifter was a recent victim), family breakdown and chronic levels of personal debt are standard topics of conversation in homes and on buses that ply the capital…

The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, disapproves of all this Cassandraism… Mr Khamenei demands an end to “negativist” statements from the country’s officials, which breed “hopelessness”.

But the authorities do not like excessive hilarity, either. In the sweltering heat of late July, when several hundred young men and women turned up at a Tehran park to soak each other with water pistols, the mirth was deemed impious, and arrests were made…

Iran’s leaders put a stop to participatory politics when they rigged the 2009 presidential election…

But the silencing of organised opposition has not brought peace to the country’s decision-making elite, even if its members claim to be united behind the principle of clerical rule. On the contrary, in government, as in society, dangerous fissures have opened up…

Relations between Mr Ahmadinejad and some of his former backers have deteriorated to such an extent that the president is now depicted as a maverick who has been “bewitched” by his own chief of staff…

Yet for all the pressure he is under, Mr Ahmadinejad has assets of his own. A brilliant populist, he has showered enough attention and largesse on poor, pious Iranians to win a place in their hearts. Last winter’s reform of ruinous price subsidies was a hot potato that only he dared to touch. As expected, inflation has risen (it is expected to peak at 22% early next year) but a new monthly dole has softened the blow for many people…

Almost entirely reliant on oil receipts, unproductive and monopolistic, Iran’s economy is not as strong as it should be. Entrepreneurship has been stymied by sanctions, while the Revolutionary Guard’s commercial divisions take over ever larger bits of the economy in the absence of foreign investment…

On the country’s periphery, revolts by minorities such as the (mostly Sunni) Kurds and Baluchis smoulder on…

In such an environment, it is not surprising that existential angst in various forms, religious and secular, is now perceptible across Iranian society…