Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Monday, August 27, 2012

How much will people pay?

The Iranian government is asking a lot of its citizens in order to pursue its nuclear goals. The question is how much are people willing to "pay" for the those policies?

When will it ever end? For ordinary Iranians, daily life goes from bad to worse

THE last time fruit and chicken were luxuries in Iran was back in the 1980s, when the country was fighting against Iraq… Non-combatants in the big cities generally accepted shortages and other privations with patriotic stoicism.

Two-and-a-half decades on, Iran again gives the impression of a country at war even if, for the moment, the guns are silent. Prices of basic food, clothes and electronic goods have soared as a result of international sanctions and a plummeting currency…

The solidarity of the 1980s is conspicuous by its absence. Last month a limited sale of subsidised chicken prompted mini-riots…

The country’s leaders have belatedly acknowledged that their insistence that Iran must enrich its uranium in defiance of the West is causing pain. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has called for an “economy of resistance” based on self-reliance…

In fact, Iran is much richer than it was in the war years of the 1980s. On paper at least, it earned a plentiful $120 billion from oil revenues in the financial year ending in March 2011. Some of the lucre has gone to finance the pro-poor subsidies beloved of the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but big sums have also found their way into the pockets of senior clerics, former Revolutionary Guard commanders and well-connected businessmen at the heart of the economic elite. Porsche says it sold more cars in Tehran in 2011 than in any other city in the Middle East…

The president has accused his political enemies of deliberately stoking inflation in order to harm him. Parliament plans to deny the government a role in staging next year’s elections, the plan apparently being to “elect” a candidate more fully obedient to the supreme leader, whom obsequious disciples now consider quasi-divine.

The Islamic Republic now seems to be more disliked than at any time since the revolution of 1979 that ended the monarchy, for which some people are showing nostalgia…