Finance minister fired as economic woes multiply

TEHRAN — Iran’s parliament voted Sunday to fire the country’s finance minister amid an economic free fall fanned by America’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal with world powers, dealing another blow to President Hassan Rouhani’s embattled administration.

It’s unlikely that parliament’s dismissal of Masoud Karbasian will staunch the bleeding with Iran’s rial currency falling to new lows against the U.S. dollar as chronically high unemployment and inflation haunt the country.

However, it shows Iran’s Shiite theocracy’s growing recognition of the anger felt across the country of 80 million, which has seen months of sporadic protests challenging it.

“Over the last year since you became the minister, the dinner table of the people has shrunk to the point of invisibility,” conservative lawmaker Hosseinali Hajideligani of Isfahan told Karbasian during the legislative hearing. “The purchasing power of the people has dropped down at least by 50 percent. You have made the people poorer every day.”

A narrow majority of 137 lawmakers in the 260-seat parliament voted to fire Karbasian, an Iranian economist who became the country’s finance minister in August 2017 after Rouhani won re-election.

Karbasian sought to defend himself, saying that America had “targeted our entire economy and social fortifications.”

Yet even reformist lawmakers who often back Rouhani, himself a relatively moderate cleric within Iran’s government, lashed at out at Karbasian.

“Why should the people suffer from this situation? What is the people’s fault?” asked reformist lawmaker Elias Hazrati of Tehran asked at one point.

Karbasian’s dismissal comes after lawmakers similarly dismissed Rouhani’s labor minister, Ali Rabiei, earlier this month.

Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, reached in 2015 under President Barack Obama’s administration, saw it agree to limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.

But Trump’s decision in May to withdraw from the accord halted billion-dollar deals Iran struck with oil firms and airplane manufacturers.