Reports from almost all of Iran’s economic centers and the government’s economists indicate a dark situation for the regime’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his new president-elect Ebrahim Raisi.
Iran’s statistic center in its latest report announced the annual inflation rate for Iranian households in May of 2021 at 43 percent.
Even the IMF did not predict that Iran’s inflation will surpass 40 percent. But the inflation in Iran has reached its highest rate in the past 26 years.
According to the country’s statistic center, the inflation rate of food items was much higher than other goods and services and has reached 52 percent.
The question is, will this situation change with the presence of Raisi who in the last 42 years was one of the government’s officials and one of the main causes of this situation.
At least one state-run outlet has answered this question: “Like all the years we have had elections in the country. Statelessness and indecision are expected to continue this year. Therefore, it is unlikely that we will have less inflation than last year.” (state-run website Tejarat-e-Farda, June 22, 2021)
The reality is that the country’s economy has become a sunless sky for the government, “Unfavorable economic governance, which has manifested itself mainly since the 70s, has created and accumulated challenges in the Iranian economy, and governments have not sought basic treatment of challenges and super-challenges until now in 2021.” (State-run daily Iran, June 22, 2021)
Even the government’s economic slogans have lost their value, and as the officials said they are not effective anymore:
“The quality of policy-making in the Iranian economy has fallen to its lowest level in the last half-century, i.e., since the late 1980s, and the cross-cutting efforts of governments to improve the quality of policy-making have been unsustainable and failed for various reasons.
“The main reason for this instability and failure is the rooting of a ‘rent-protecting’ layer in the fabric of the country’s bureaucracy, which has a rent-seeking instruction on the table for all good slogans. Governments come and go, but this middle layer is always there, transforming any reform in a way that is compatible with the rent-consuming structure existing in the economy.” (Donya-e-Eghtesad, June 22, 2021)
Happy officials, miserable people
Calling the people miserable in the presidential debates was so insulting that even some of the regime’s elements could not endure such an insult. One of them in an article written in the state-run daily SMT News on June 22, 2021, said:
“The debate of the presidential candidates was an opportunity to see the view of some of the country’s top officials towards me and those around me, when the country’s top executives, who once came from the lowest strata of society and were supposed to remain our defenders forever, stared into the camera, and in the verbal war with its rival, they called us people miserable, and when they said that their hearts burn because our misery and they will try to bring a piece of bread to our tables and give us subsidies, with all my skin, flesh, bones, soul and spirit, I felt this miserable.
“If we were not miserable, an official who becomes an official with the support of the people and during these years has done whatever he wants with us and our city and country, he could not simply play us with the morally unfortunate word misery.
“If we were not miserable, we would not have spent hours in front of the national media watching the bleak image of corruption, rent-seeking, and shortcoming painted by unique individuals, which from the 85 million people only they were approved by the Guardian Council.
“If we were not miserable, we would at least ask you, nobles, who have been ministers, lawyers, mayors, judges, governors, doctors, and engineers all these years, and you are one of the highest officials in our country, how did you have all this information about rent-seeking, corruption, lies, and hypocrisy yet kept silent?”
