While Raisi boasts of his achievements, Iran’s economy continues to worsen

 By Shamsi Saadati

In his recent trip to Qom province, Iranian regime president Ebrahim Raisi said that his government’s decisions have led to a decrease in inflation. This claim is so absurd that even the regime’s own state media and officials have refuted and mocked it.

“One of the problems with the system is that our officials don’t claim responsibility for their own statements,” former MP Mohammad Reza Kabaz said.

“The slogans of Raisi’s government increase by the day, but there has been no action,” sociologist Amanollah Gharaei Moghadam said.

And reflecting on the first hundred days of Raisi’s presidency, the state-run Eghtesad-e Puya noted that “neither the employment nor the livelihood problems of the people have been solved.” Eghtesad Puya further noted that during Raisi’s presidency, the situation has worsened to the point that people are sleeping in buses because they can’t pay rent.

Regarding the declining economic situation, the state-run Hamdeli newspaper reports that the inflation rate has exceeded 45 percent and the minimum expenditures of a family has reached 115 million rials but salaries have not changed since the beginning of the year and remain at half or a third of the costs of living. “People can’t cover their costs,” Hamdeli writes.

Discussing Raisi’s 2022 budget bill, Kar Va Kargar website writes, “The budget for next year will result in more poverty for the people.”

And Emrooz website notes that like its predecessors, the Raisi administration will try to cover the growing government budget deficits by raising more taxes on the increasingly impoverished Iranian population.

Mardom Salari warns that while Raisi had promised to bring inflation “down to single digit,” the economic meltdown is so bad that “experts are warning that the continued trend is indicating that the government is reaching the end of its honeymoon.”

On the other hand, different experts and officials are warning about poverty, hunger, and the critical situation of life for millions of people across Iran. Not a day goes by without state media reporting the tragic conditions of life in Iran, from people living buses to women selling their hair to make ends meet, from the high prices of meat and basic goods to the poor work conditions of millions of workers who are protesting in dozens of cities.

At the same time, while the regime refrains from addressing the basic needs of the people, it goes to great lengths to bolster its repression and propaganda apparatus. In this year’s budget bill, Raisi raised the budget of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) by 240 percent. The state-run broadcasting corporation and the judiciary also received huge boosts to their budgets. Meanwhile, teachers, pensioners, and other government employees who have been protesting for their most basic rights have received little to nothing of an improvement to their salaries, certainly not enough to account for the rising inflation rate.

Even the Majlis (parliament), whose members have been strictly vetted and chosen to be regime loyalists, is admitting that the regime is facing serious challenges and are warning Raisi that the livelihood conditions of the people “are turning into a serious problem” and implicitly mocked the regime president by saying, “when will you go beyond just expressing sympathy and sadness.”

As has been in the past decades, the regime’s response has not been to address the people’s needs but to suppress them with violence. But suppression and violence are proving to be more and more futile against an outraged society that has nothing to lose but poverty and tyranny. Even the former speaker of the Majlis, Ali Motahari, warned that the “crises of the system” will not go away with killing and “the crises will remain under the skin of the society.

This article was first published by english.mojahedin