Ahmadinejad exploits Iran’s economic woes as he battles regime
Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the country’s supreme leader and the Revolutionary Guard militia’s stranglehold on the economy after some of his allies were detained on criminal charges.
Mr Ahmadinejad, who was barred from another run at the presidency in last year’s election, has resorted to open letters to condemn the nation’s most powerful institutions.
In a series of letters to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he warned of the effects of the country’s economic decline. He said the stultifying role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in business needed to be tackled.
“Do you think if I keep silent about the economic and political problems of our country they would go away by themselves?” Mr Ahmadinejad said.
“It is my revolutionary duty to warn that there is a widespread dissatisfaction among our nation about the performance of a system that is fast approaching the very foundations of our Islamic revolution.”
His camp has sought to capitalise on domestic discontent, highlighted by nationwide street riots this year, as the country’s economy has slipped deeper into a downturn.
This has fuelled fears that the former president hungers after a comeback and meant some members of his inner circle, who are loosely described as principalists, have come under legal pressure in recent months.
Delivering a televised Nowruz message on Tuesday, Mr Ahmadinejad took up the plight of his former deputy Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, who he said had led a campaign for UN recognition of the Persian New Year festival.
Mr Ahmadinejad condemned the arrest of Mr Mashaei this week on charges of publicly criticising a prison sentence imposed on Hamid Baghaie, another former deputy. Baghaie has been imprisoned on fraud charges.
The backdrop to the row has been Mr Ahmadinejad’s twopronged attack on the troubled economy and pervasive corruption, which the former president claims are linked. He criticism has focused on Iran’s judiciary and its head, Ayatollah Amoli Larijani.
An analyst says that Mr Ahmadinejad has a point, even if his presidency was marred by the same endemic flaws.
“Iran’s economy is a complete mess,” economist Dr Manochehr Farah-Bakhshah told The National. “To be more precise, there is actually no economic system in place at all.
“More than 50 per cent of the economy is in the hands of the Revolutionary Guard and the so-called charities that are run by the office of the supreme leader.
“About 30 per cent of it is controlled by the government and the rest is run by small struggling private enterprises. There is no meaningful investment in the industries and the banks are bankrupted. The country is fed through subsidies and imported goods.”
The irony that Iran’s economic situation started during Mr Ahmadinejad’s presidency is lost on his followers. It was his policies that eroded living standards just as international sanctions against Iran’s underground nuclear programme reached a zenith.
On the first day of his presidency in 2005 Mr Ahmadinejad ordered the closure of Iran’s Organisation for Economic
Do you think if I keep silent about the economic and political problems they would go away by themselves? MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD Former president of Iran
Policy and Budget Planning, which had survived the purges of all the former shah regime’s departments.
While inflation has been tamed, there has been little sign of the reforms that would deliver new growth. Entering his sixth year in office with the motto of “opening the closed doors to Iran’s economic prosperity”, President Hassan Rouhani has been unable to fight corruption out of fears the move would destabilise the establishment.
Mr Ahmadinejad is betting that the economic chaos that his administration created will prevent the Rouhani government from succeeding, making his return to power easier.
He and his supporters have presented their camp as the only hope of “the true spring of freedom and prosperity for the Iranians”.
Yet the talk strikes many as a proxy battle for power. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the regime, once famously declared the “economy is a matter for donkeys”. The likelihood of true reform remains as remote as ever.