Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, February 28, 2014

Power centers in Iran

Dismantling the wall: Hassan Rohani has changed the mood in Iran. But he faces opposition

Hopes that an economy long hampered by international sanctions may soon grow again have been rising ever since the election last June of President Hassan Rohani...

Hassan Rohani

“At last we have reason to be cheerful,” grins one Tehran resident. Few deny that the fractious atmosphere that prevailed under Mr Rohani’s predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has changed. The new president has a co-operative touch, working with parliament, for instance, to pass his first budget in record time... After years of steady devaluation, Iran’s currency has stabilised. The IMF reckons inflation fell over the last six months of 2013 from 45% to under 30%...

Yet big obstacles remain to lasting improvement in the daily lives of Iranians. Opponents of the country’s current diplomatic initiatives abound...

Mr Rohani is acknowledged to be a canny operator with strong public support, but he faces powerful opposition in the form of revolutionary ideologues and militarists. For them, detente would be anathema...

Iran’s conservatives are used to baiting moderate presidents... They have moved against one of Mr Rohani’s allies, Sadegh Zibakalam, a political scientist, who dared recently to ask what Iran’s nuclear effort has achieved for a country whose development indicators rival those of African countries. More than 5m Iranians are unemployed, Mr Zibakalam said, and the country is ravaged by drought. He has since been charged with “weakening the system”.

But Mr Rohani is made of sterner stuff than former leaders. On February 4th he called critics of the nuclear deal “barely literate”. A day later he successfully browbeat hardliners who control the state broadcasting monopoly into reversing a sudden decision not to air a scheduled interview with him...

Khamenei

Mr Rohani’s ability to prosper also lies in the ayatollah’s hands, which control many of the levers of Iran’s “deep state”. Mr Khamenei’s attitude towards the diplomatic process has been calculatedly ambiguous. In a speech on February 17th, the eve of the Vienna talks, he said Iran “would not breach what it had started”. Yet he also admitted he was not optimistic...

Still, for all their bravado, Iran’s long-triumphant conservatives have weaknesses of their own. Public backing for the nuclear programme, which by some estimates has cost upwards of $400 billion when outlays and losses from sanctions are combined, may be weaker than regime supporters assume. Conservatives cannot fail to take note of economic realities, either...