Iran’s economic gloom dims enthusiasm for coming elections

For porters looking for business as they push empty carts through the arched passageways of Tehran’s Grand Bazaar Iran’s economic recovery still seems a long way off.

The subdued seasonal shopping just one month before Norouz, the Iranian new year holiday, is adding to widespread gloom about a prolonged economic stagnation that has also dimmed public enthusiasm for the crucial upcoming elections.

On February 26, people will go to the polls to choose 290 members of the parliament and 88 senior clerics for the Assembly of Experts whose main job is to determine Iran’s next supreme leader.

Aslan, a 66-year-old porter, says he has never seen such hard times despite working for more than four decades in the traditional market, which draws many of the capital’s middle-class residents.

“I’m lucky if I earn 15,000 tomans [150,000 rials, or $5] a day,” Aslan says, while squatting on his metal cart parked in front of a shop with its grey blind shut due to poor business. “It is much worse than this time last year, which was not a good year, either, but I still could earn 50,000 tomans a day.”

Yet, Aslan says he and his large family see it as their national and religious duty to go and vote next Friday, even though he does not know who the candidates are.

Like Aslan, many merchants and shoppers at the Bazaar are frustrated with economic hardships that have persisted despite the lifting of international sanctions in January as part of a deal in which the Islamic republic had to dramatically scale down its nuclear activities.

Hassan Rouhani, the country’s centrist president, is now blamed by many for failing to deliver on his election campaign promises to help improve the economy with the nuclear agreement. Although inflation has shrunk — from a peak of about 40 per cent in 2013, when Mr Rouhani took the reins, to about 13 per cent today, according to central bank figures — economic growth is next to zero and people are unwilling to purchase goods.

Despite widely expressed disappointment with the outcome of the nuclear accord, many retailers and shoppers in the bazaar are saying: “Let’s wait and see”, and express hope that the economy will turn around in the year ahead. Others are not so confident.

The elections also come at a time when a tense power struggle between moderate forces led by Mr Rouhani and hardliners has resulted in most of reformist candidates being barred from running for the election.

The biggest blow to pro-reform forces came after the moderate grandson of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Hassan Khomeini, was disqualified by the hardline Guardian Council — the constitutional watchdog that vets candidates’ Islamic credentials — on the grounds that he was not religiously and politically qualified to stand for the Assembly of Experts. Moderate groups were hoping that having the 43-year-old cleric as a candidate would help energise their supporters.

Analysts doubt whether remaining prominent reformist candidates, including Mr Rouhani and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, will be enough to encourage supporters to come out to vote.

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