With the chronic unemployment, severe inflation and rising prices of everyday goods, Iran has reached the peak of ‘economic instability’. Day after day, the situation becomes more and more dire and with no easy way to resolve it, it is only a matter of time until unexpected events bring the entire system to a complete collapse.
With the little money that many ordinary Iranians receive each month, their purchase power is immense within the first 10 days, as they fear that prices will only increase the longer they wait.
The state-run Tejarat newspaper wrote in their December 30 publication that, “Although these changes may be due to the lack of the salaries of wage earners, who make up most of the society, the reality is that people do not trust the market and prices and try to turn them into commodities as soon as they earn money.”
The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) said, “This instability can be seen in the hopelessness of the economic enterprises. Most of them are suffering from the instability of the market.”
As a result, within the regime’s government an increasing dispute has developed between the economic officials who are only creating barriers for each other.
On the Seday-e Eslahat website last month, they wrote, “It seems that the economic team of Dr. Ebrahim Raisi’s government is not in sync with each other and there are deep disagreements.”
They described the situation within the economic team as a ‘tangled web’, stating that given Iran’s economic problems, it is ‘impossible to identify their joint plan’.
The MEK said, “Such comments are not limited to observations by analysts and reporters. The reality is that there is huge turbulence in Raisi’s economic team.”
The Seday-e Eslahat website warned that if Raisi is unable to ‘show more determination’ and ‘be able to have the last word on his own’, there will be a huge power struggle within Iran’s economic system.
Economist Hossein Raghfar weighed in on this issue in an article for the state-run Emtedad media outlet. He said, “The adoption of inconsistent positions by the economic team and the incoherence in this area indicate that the expectations of the president in this regard have not been fulfilled.”
The MEK said, “While this situation is normal in the regime’s government, but at a time when supreme leader Ali Khamenei is hoping to carry out his goals by consolidating the government to his loyalists, such confusion is despairing for him, and he is witnessing a torn government.”
The Emtedad article also stated that conflicts within the structure of Iran’s economic system have existed for decades, but no one is taking any responsibility for the issues, instead laying the blame on others.
The issues are apparent across all levels of the regime, with low-ranking officials even complaining about the current situation. A member of the Supreme Council of the Stock Exchange was quoted in the state-run ILNA news agency’s December 27 publication saying, “Even though at first all these economic pillars of the government talked about a special coordination between the economic team, but this coordination was not seen, and we saw in the subject of subsidies that the economic officials are not coordinated and in other cases, these disagreements are seen in the government’s economic team.”
The MEK said, “The fact is that the regime’s economy is devastated and most of its officials are confessing to it. And these confessions show hopelessness and a complete stalemate and instability of the regime.”
