Iran hardliners target Rouhani as US pressure grows

GENEVA: Growing United States pressure on Iran has weakened President Hassan Rouhani and made his hardline rivals more assertive at home and abroad, recent developments show.

When he succeeded firebrand leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2013, Rouhani was seen as an establishment figure who would do little to end Iran’s long standoff with the West. Two years later, his administration signed the nuclear deal with six world powers that spurred hopes for wider political change.

Rouhani’s authority is now waning: his brother, a key adviser on the 2015 deal, has been sentenced to jail on unspecified corruption charges, a hardline rival heads the judiciary and his government is under fire for responding too softly to US President Donald Trump’s sanctions squeeze.

Trump had said lifting sanctions in return for curbs on Iran’s nuclear programme did not stop Teheran meddling in neighbouring states or developing ballistic missile capabilities and Rouhani’s outreach to the West was a fig leaf.

Yet the US pullout from the nuclear deal a year ago and subsequent attempts to end Iran’s oil exports had led to a sharp increase in regional tension: the US military said on Tuesday it was braced for “possibly imminent threats to US forces” from Iran-backed forces in neighbouring Iraq.

Rouhani had urged opposing factions to work together and noted limits on his power in a country where an elected government operated under clerical rule and alongside powerful security forces and an influential judiciary.

“How much authority the government has in the areas that are being questioned must be examined,” the presidency’s website quoted Rouhani as saying on Saturday, an apparent attempt to fend off public anger at plummeting living standards.

Ebrahim Raisi, who became head of the judiciary in March and is a contender to succeed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, retorted that all branches of government had sufficient authority to carry out their duties.

Local media interpreted the statement as a direct rebuke from Raisi, who ran against Rouhani in the 2017 presidential election.

On May 4, Rouhani’s brother Hossein Fereydoun was sentenced to prison. The judiciary had not given details of the charges against him. The judiciary had said it had no political motivation for the cases it tried.

Rouhani has two years until his term ends, but if he is seen by Iranians as responsible for their problems, his successor was more likely to take a hard line with the West, analysts said.

When Rouhani announced last week that Iran would roll back some of its commitments under the nuclear deal a year after Trump withdrew, the hardline daily Kayhan newspaper called the move “late and minimal”.

“If Rouhani’s government had reacted reciprocally from the beginning to the broken promises of the US and Europe, they would not have reached this level of arrogance,” an article in the newspaper said yesterday.

Restrictions on social media, championed by hardline officials and clerics, are putting further political pressure on Rouhani, who promised in his 2017 and 2013 election campaigns to lift such curbs.

Messaging app Telegram was banned last year. Twitter is also banned and hardliners had set their sights on Instagram.

In his comments on Saturday, Rouhani said the government did not have full authority over the cyberspace, underlining the limits to his powers.

He and other officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have active Twitter accounts despite the ban.