Tell People The Nuclear Deal Is Dead, Iranian Lawmaker Says
An Iranian lawmaker has called on the authorities to tell the people that the Vienna talks to restore the 2015 nuclear deal will yield no results.
An Iranian lawmaker has called on the authorities to tell the people that the Vienna talks to restore the 2015 nuclear deal will yield no results.
Mahmoud Ahmadi-Bighash, who is a member of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy committee, said on Saturday that there is no news about the revival of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) because it has reached a dead-end.
He said the fate of the JCPOA is entangled with the lives of people and they are subconsciously invested in the talks, therefore “if we tell people the truth about the JCPOA... they will know what to do”.
“Our differences with the United States and the Europeans are fundamental”, he noted, saying that “the Americans believe that we should give up our principles while we want them to give up their arrogant and bullying behavior”.
Ahmadi-Bighash added, “We cannot give up our revolutionary principles because they are inherent in our religious obligations”, claiming that the issue of the Revolutionary Guard being listed by the as a terrorist organization by the US is just an excuse.
He praised relations with Russia and China and emphasized the Islamic Republic's motto of "self-reliance", but except Israel, the lawmaker said, Iran should have relations with all counties.
Negotiations, which started in Vienna in April 2021 to revive the Obama-era nuclear deal, JCPOA, have been on a protracted pause since March 11, as the Islamic Republic demanded removing its Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) from a US list of terrorist organizations.
While rising bread prices have turned even some of Raisi's supporters against him, Massih Mohajeri, the editor of Jomhouri Eslami (Islamic Republic) newspaper who usually criticizes the administration's policies wrote in an editorial on Saturday, "Now that it has become clear that you cannot solve the problems, step down bravely and leave the job to those who can do it and save the people from this dangerous quagmire."
The editorial charged that "Media close to the administration label those who criticize you for the problems you have created as counter-revolutionaries who work for Israel and the United States." It went on to say that some of Raisi’s supporters are also protesting the government's policies.
Mohajeri further asked, "The president should say how much time does he need to understand that problems cannot be solved by just talking and the government cannot be run in this way." He added: "Blaming all shortages on smugglers is not a solution,” and if that is the problem, why the government does not stop them.
Ukraine and nuclear talks with the US
"If the problem of flour shortage is caused by the war in Ukraine, why you don’t condemn Russia's aggression against Ukraine and not try to stop Vladmir Putin from continuing the invasion, which threatens the livelihood of a major part of the world?" Mohajeri asked Raisi.
He also asked Raisi why he does not do anything to reach an agreement with the United States. "You said you will not tie the country's fate to the [nuclear] negotiations, but by not doing anything, you have created new problems for the nation."
Many in Iran know it is Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who decides key foreign policy and other state matters, but semi-official media would not dare to blame the economic crisis directly on Khamenei.
Mohajeri addressed Raisi that "If the instability of the government and the current dangerous situation have not been created by infiltrators, then they must be attributed to the poor management of your economic ministers."
He reminded that the price of bread in Iran did not rise even during the war with Iraq in the 1980s. He warned that raising the price of flour and rationing bread are like setting fire to gunpowder. Further warning that there are several individuals affiliated with the deviant group [jargon referring to those close to former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad], Mohajeri charged that these elements could be attempting to unseat the current government and asked Raisi to take this warning seriously.
Economic crisis main topic of media
On Saturday, most newspapers in Tehran which are usually silent about economic problems, covered the shortage of these items in extensive stories, although the government's own newspaper, Iran, and the hardline daily Khorasan claimed that people were happy about the situation and "over 62 percent of Iranians said they were happy about the government's performance in a poll that was conducted before the unusual bread price rise."
At the same time, Mostafa Hashemi Taba, a former presidential candidate, said in an interview published by Didban Iran website that "the Raisi Administration has totally lost its social capital." He said the government wants to be portrayed as a revolutionary government abroad, but it wishes to adopt liberal economic policies inside the country. He said there are only two solutions to the problem: Either the government should be able to distribute all of the people's needs, or it has to resort to rationing essential commodities.
Meanwhile, economist Hossein Raghfar told Khabar Online website that the government's policy over bread is not transparent. He dismissed the official statements about flour being smuggled out of Iran as "fabrication" and maintained that the problem is the falling value of the currency, which he said rose from 10,000 rials per dollar to 35,000 rials in 2011, and from 30,000 rials in Janyary 2018 to 320,000 rials in January 2021. He charged that rich people in power benefitted from all of these changes while they ignored the interests of the ordinary Iranians.
While the assumption behind the idea of creating a consolidated conservative government was to make it agile and efficient, even supporters of the government say a hardliner president and parliament have been unable to feed the people.
In recent weeks, prices of essential food items, such as cooking oil, flour and sugar have at least doubled.
According to moderate conservative Khabar Online, what was initially a dream, has become a challenge for the Islamic Republic. The heavy political cost of consolidation, wrote the website, fell on the shoulders of everyone including those who had designed the new system in which the main criterion for appointment of government officials is their loyalty to a single political group.
That group has one single trait and that is loyalty to the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
The process started with facilitating a landslide victory for hardliners in the 2020 parliamentary elections and completed by doing the same in the 2021 presidential election, mainly by eliminating all the candidates that were not part of the hardliner conservative camp. Later in 2021, Khamenei appointed a well-known hardliner as Judiciary Chief, completing the handover of all power to loyal hardliners who soon got rid of anyone in the government who was not in their camp.
The keyword throughout the entire process was "change." And what was to be changed was presumably the worsening economic situation. However, ten months later, government officials including the president still blame "those who created the current situation.”
However, few openly say that the economic crisis, reflected in rapidly increasing food prices, is to an extent the result of sanctions imposed by the United States that can only be lifted if Khamenei agrees to resolve Iran’s nuclear dispute with the West.
Analysts coming from various political factions, even those at the IRGC-linked Fars news agency were saying that "the root cause of the country's problems was corruption, coupled with plundering of national resources by a well-connected few." They also thought a consolidated government can put an end to all that by getting rid of political rivalries.
But rivalries did not end. Last week, Majles Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf suggested that the controversy about his family's luxury shopping in Turkey was engineered by his political rivals with the assistance of some intelligence agencies. Later in the week, a letter signed by 233 out of the 290 lawmakers was sent to Khamenei expressing support for Ghalibaf. This week, several lawmakers complained that the letter was supposed to be containing a pledge of allegiance to Khamenei and that they were not told it was to express support for Ghalibaf.
Meanwhile, while Raisi had promised to form a non-factional cabinet, he chose nearly all his ministers from among the ultraconservative Paydari Party and the officials of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's cabinet. The parliament also became divided into at least four factions of Paydari, Ahamdiejad's men, Ghalibaf's neo-con aides and traditional conservatives.
Former lawmaker Gholam Ali Jafarzadeh Imanabadi has said that the government has failed and now those who engineered the consolidated system should be held accountable. Some lawmakers includingMostafa Reza Hosseini Ghotbabadi have gone further and called on parliament to table a motion to unseat the President for incompetence. Ghotbabadi said that the Majles has been mulling the idea of Raisi's incompetency at least twice in recent months.
