Iran’s state-run media are warning that a nationwide uprising could be on the horizon as the people face major social problems because of the regime’s mismanagement.

Hassan Rouhani’s government presented its 2021 budget recently and to say that it was not well-received would be an understatement. Even economic experts inside the regime have described it as fanciful because it ignores the financial problems caused by oil sanctions, the coronavirus, and the regime’s corruption.

The budget proposes an increase in military (read: terrorist proxy) funding by 58%, according to the state-run Diyarmirza news agency.

The Hamdeli daily warned that social ills, including poverty, were only rising and that about a quarter of Iranians live in places with the minimum public services (i.e. health and education), which have been cut in this budget by 12.9%,  while around an eighth of the country live in informal settlements.

The paper wrote: “Families who have several [disabled people] are unable to pay their unbearable medical and caring costs. So, they turn to organizations like the State Welfare Organization. When these organizations do not have a sufficient budget, how could they answer these people? Many experts believe the 2021 budget has paid little attention to social harms.”

Of course, it should be noted that institutionalized regime corruption means that even the social institutions that should be helping the poor only use a fraction of their budget to that effect

In addition to poverty, Iranians are facing the horrors of the Covid-19 pandemic, from which over 184,000 people have now died, because of the regime’s inability and unwillingness to control it. While many countries have started or are about to start vaccinating their people, the regime is refusing to give a straight answer about when and how they will get the vaccine.

This seems like the regime is trying desperately to use Covid-19 to prevent these predicted uprisings, relying on the Iranians not wanting to protest if they could catch a deadly disease that could kill the people they love. After all, the 2018 and 2019 uprisings proved a major threat to the regime, shaking the mullahs to their core and very nearly brought down the whole system. If protests had sprung up to that extent in 2020, who knows what would have happened?

But health official Mohammad Reza Mahboubfar said that people may well protest anyway if they see the rest of the world being vaccinated and not them.