PersuMedia Weekly Newsletter

Bottom Line & Above

9 November – 15 November 2022

Now entering their third month, the protests in Iran are serving as a kind of stress test for the Islamic Republic. Like a submarine that has dived to the deepest limits of its design specifications, the Iranian ship of state creaks and groans under the pressure and occasionally one of its rivets pops. A case in point is our featured story this week, “Rejection of Extremism in Domestic Politics,” which details how the old guard conservatives of the Nezam are blaming the ascendant hardliners for provoking the multiple crises besetting Iran. Pious and loyal to the Islamic Republic, these cautious and less dogmatic elites have in recent years been sidelined as insufficiently revolutionary as a fiercer, more combative, and ideological cohort of Khamenei loyalists assumed power. Now, with the people in the streets, the JCPOA negotiations comatose, and the economy circling the drain, these old oligarchs are demanding that the hardliners leave the arena and that the adults in charge start making amends for the excesses of the hardliners. No, the Islamic Republic is not coming apart at the seams—not yet anyway—but it is indicative of the degree to which the political establishment of the Nezam is worried about the direction of the country.

Our other selected articles this week make clear that there is reason for worry. Our China watchers lay out in detail how far, despite its vaunted “Look to the East” policy, Iran has fallen behind its Arab and Israeli rivals in building robust economic and commercial relations with China. It must be particularly galling to Tehran that its trade with China is dwarfed not just by that of the despised Saudis and Emiratis, but also by the commercial ventures of the hated “Zionist entity,” Israel. The next story, “Spiraling Inflation Can Fuel Further Social Unrest,” details the Nezam’s losing fight against inflation and applies our AI tools to chart the rising negative sentiment about the economy expressed in Iranian social media. We also examine the protesters’ efforts to exploit the Nezam’s economic Achilles’ Heel with a general strike that, whether out of sympathy with or fear of the protests, has caused bazaar merchants to shutter their shops. Our selection ends with an interesting bit of clerical “inside baseball,” in which a former seminary teacher of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, in a posthumously released video interview, questions the Rahbar’s clerical credentials. That the emperor has no clothes—at least as far as his theological chops are concerned—is not a new story, but the fact that the video has been released at this time points to the degree to which the Leader, like his hardliner proteges, is being held at fault for steering the Islamic Republic into such perilous straits. Read More ==>