Teachers Across Iran Protest For Pay, Release Of Jailed Colleagues

Academic Taghi Azad Armaki in an interview said that Iranian politicians and political activists have largely not noticed the significance of this shift, although ultimately it is going to be dangerous for the government since economic and social demands relate to concrete issues.

Armaki added that the protests in Esfahan last month over lack of water and the nationwide protests by teachers demanding a long overdue pay adjustment and job classification are the examples of this shift.

However, in most economic protests it does take long for people to shift their focus to the regime and raise slogans against the very essence of the Islamic Republic.

Meanwhile, he said that Iran's reformists have failed to represent the people before the government, partly because the conservative core of the regime has pushed them aside from the country's political dynamics and practically ignored their presence.

Other analysts have tried to explain other dimensions of the same problem. Conservative analyst Amir Mohebbian has said in an interview with the economic daily Donyaye Eqtesad, "We need to reconsider the concept of being revolutionary." He added that "Today, some revolutionaries look for what the people like and then they take a rejectionist stance against it."

Mohebbian was probably talking about Kazem Mousavi the lawmaker who said those who like sunglasses and western lifestyle should leave the country, or hardline journalist Hossein Shariatmadari who has said the government should ignore demands for a pay increase for government employees and further suggested that all social media outlets should be banned altogether.

Some reformists' view about what is going in the Iranian society also indicate that the situation described by Armaki is getting worse.Mohammad Reza Tajik has told reformist daily newspaper Sharq that Iran's reformists can no longer return to power by scaring the voters of their conservative rivals. People are looking beyond the traditional dichotomy of Conservatives versus reformists.

Tajik also pointed out that under current circumstances there is little or no room for reformists in Iranian politics. He said not only the ruling conservatives will not allow reformists to be politically active, but they even cannot tolerate some of the more or less independent or moderate conservative figures. He was possibly talking about the situation of Former Majles Speaker Ali Larijani who was barred by hardliners to run in the June 2021 presidential election.

According to Armaki, however, the only chance for reformists is to align themselves with various social groups and support their grievances, otherwise, they will be kicked out of the political circus if they want to continue their position as a political alternative to the current political system.

Speaking about hardliner conservatives such as Shariatmadari and Kazem Mousavi, Armaki said, "Hardliners do not want and cannot suppress the society's social and cultural demands. The most they can do is to fan short-lived controversies with their state of denial by saying that "There is no value in social media," or "Relations with the world are not important," or "We need to fight the corrupt West." He said the state of denial highlights the fact that hardliners cannot deal with these issues. But regardless of their denials, they have to face the consequences of some of those demands at one point, when the need to have good relations with the West, or supply water to Esfahan become urgent matters and endanger the regime.

"Seminaries must use the money coming from people who pay willingly. Seminaries must be independent [from the government]," Ayatollah Mostafa Mohaghegh-Damad, a professor of Islamic law at Shahid Beheshti University of Tehran, said in a speech on a book dedicated to the Centenary of the Qom Seminary. "Today one of the problems of the seminary is its dependence on the government."

The Qom Seminary, established by Sheikh Abdul-Karim Haeri-Yazdi in 1922, is the largest Shiite seminary (hawza) in Iran with over 75,000 students. Seminaries were self-funded before the Islamic Revolution but like many other religious institutions, they now receive huge sums annually from the government.

In his speech, Mohaghegh-Damad, a moderate religious figure and a member of Iran's Science Academy, cited examples of prominent Shiite religious leaders who have emphasized the importance of separating religion from politics.

The budget allocated to religious institutions in the first budget bill presented to Parliament by President Ebrahim Raisi recently is noticeably higher in comparison with the previous year's budget – at least on those instances where clear figures have been noted.

For instance, the budget proposed for the Seminaries Services Center has doubled. The Seminaries Services Center is to receive 2.8 trillion rials which is higher than the 2,157 trillion rials allocated to the Department of Environment and many other government bodies including the Crisis Management Headquarters. The Center also receives funding from the Supreme Leader's office.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ordered the Seminaries Services Center to be established in 1991 to provide housing assistance, health insurance, and similar services to seminary students, who are the future clerics and whose loyalty is important for the regime.

Critics say that in some cases the budgets proposed for government bodies and state entities is difficult to calculate from what is discernible in the budget bill, which does not provide sufficient details.

The government says its budget bill is based on restrictive monetary policies.

Based on the details provided in the bill, the budget of the Islamic Propaganda Organization itself has increased by 43% in comparison with the previous year and reached 11.7 trillion rials. Many other large and small institutions have also been allocated huge increases of up to 124%.

The budget allocated to Al-Mustafa International University of Qom, the Islamic Propaganda Bureau of the Qom Seminary, and the Artistic School of the Islamic Propaganda Organization have not been announced this year.

The Al-Mustafa International University, a state-funded university-style Shiite seminary with branches in many countries, received a budget nearly 5 trillion rials last year, or around $100 million based on the official exchange rate that was applicable at the time. This is higher than the budget of any university in Iran.

The Al-Mustafa University pays for hundreds of foreign students from China to Africa and Latin America who come to study and then return to spread Iranian Shiite teachings in their countries.

Hassan Marashi, the secretary general of the centrist Executives of Construction Party told the economic website Eghtesad News on Tuesday that Rouhani should have resigned as his government was formed based on the idea of holding a dialogue with the United States, but Iran's foreign policy needed to change track in 2018 after Donald Trump left the JCPOA.

"When diplomacy failed, there was no reason for Iran continuing diplomacy," Marashi said. Meanwhile,Marashi acknowledged that the pull-out by Trump was a hard blow to the Rouhani administration. It also emboldened Rouhani's political rivals to start attacking him.

"I told the Supreme Leader that we needed to change course after Trump's pull-out, and then I heard that Rouhani had suggested that he should resign, but the leader did not deem the decision fit for the situation," Marashi added.

In another development, while Rouhani's hardliners have been demanding to put him on trial for his failure to sort out the country's economic and foreign relations problems during his presidency, another reformist figure has suggested that he should welcome a trial.

"I would have welcomed the trial if I were him, " said Mohammad Ali Abtahi the chief of staff of former President Mohammad Khatami in an interview with the Iranian Labour News Agency ILNA on Tuesday, adding that the call for Rouhani's trial is a blame game to divert attention from the new government's failure in solving the country's economic problems.

Abtahi added that the lawmakers who found their way to the parliament with revolutionary slogans have not been able to bring about any positive change and the economic crisis has been deepening on daily basis during the past six months.

"They have also not managed to solve the problem the issue of nuclear negotiations and the markets are still waiting for a positive sign from Vienna, and this is against the Majles and the administration's claims about separating the fate of the country's economy from what happens in the course of the negotiations,” Abtahi argued.

Speaking of responsibility about the current situation addressed both to President Rouhani and former Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, former government spokesman Ali Rabiei, who is a swell informed veteran intelligence ministry official, summarized what Iran's hardliners call "the current situation"in his Telegram Channel and on the proreform Fararu news website.

Rabiei highlighted Iran's current situation as "the undesirable situation of economic hardships that make life difficult for decent Iranians, an unprecedented inflation worsened by the instability of Iran’s currency and other markets since 2018, widespread poverty that defies all the revolutionary slogans, the social fatigue and insecurity felt by various walks of life in Iran, a rise in emigration by elite Iranians, as well as a decline in respect for revolutionary values."

Rabiei also pointed out that decline in political participation is so bad “that in a city such as Tehran only around 7 percent of eligible voters went to the polls in the 2020 parliamentary election and in some cities the number of votes cast for the winner was barely higher than the number of those who worked at the polling station."

"Add to that the loss of Iran's geopolitical advantage, having no place in the international economy and depriving the nation of the opportunities international economy and modern technology can offer," Rabiei stressed.

This had led to “creating a peaceful atmosphere in the country in which higher officials do not take stances that are challenging to the nezam,” a commentary in Javan newspaper affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard opined.

In Iranian political jargon, nezam (system) refers to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The author, Brigadier-General Abbas Haji-Najari, is a regular contributor.

"This heralds an amalgamation of the administration and nezam after three decades," Haji-Najari wrote under the headline ‘The 13th Administration and Resolution of Dual Sovereignty.’ More than two decades ago, the reformist Saeed Hajjarian applied the term ‘dual sovereignty’ to contrast directly elected representatives – including the president and parliament members – with those appointed by the leader.

Several previous presidents, including Hassan Rouhani but more especially Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013) and Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), all experienced tensions with the Khamenei.

Reformists still cite an open letter sent by 100 parliamentarians in 2004 saying Khamenei had allowed his appointees in the Guardian Council to violate popular rights by judging some legislation unconstitutional, or anti-Islamic, and by not allowing many reformists to stand for re-election.

“Do the members of the Guardian Council dare to resist your orders?” they wrote. “Or is it that, as rumors say, despite your public statements, they were permitted by you to disqualify these people illegally and widely?”

Khamenei said in a 2004 speech that “dual sovereignty” was “not desirable but damaging…[and] what Iran’s enemies want.” The following year, Khamenei overturned a Guardian Council decision blocking two reformists to stand in the presidential election. Both failed to make a run-off ballot won by the principlist Ahmadinejad.

In 2011, Ahmadinejad refused to attend presidential duties for 11 days in protest against Khamenei's insistence that he keep in post the intelligence minister Heydar Moslehi, who the president accused of withholding information from him.

President Hassan Rouhani also made no secret of his frustration with Khamenei and the interference of his appointed bodies in various matters, particularly the nuclear issue and negotiations with the West and the United States.

"We are a great nation that have shown we can resolve the most complex and most important political issue in the world, meaning the nuclear issue, at the negotiation table. We can, therefore, resolve other regional and international issues at the negotiation table," Rouhani said in a speech 25 July 2014.

Rouhani suggested on various occasions that he lacked full support from Khamenei in his attempts to pursue Iran’s interests diplomatically. While Iran had held direct talks with the United States over Afghanistan and then Iraq, contacts were far more extensive in the two years of talks that led to the 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).

Khamenei said in a speech in October 2015 that he opposed further direct, bilateral talks with the US due to the “many hazards” and lack of benefits offered. In 2018, the US left the JCPOA. The current Vienna talks between Iran and world powers are attempting to revive it.

The chairman of the Energy Committee of Iran’s parliament, Fereydoun Abbasi, said on Monday that Kish and Qeshm free economic zones are suitable places to test the plan, to prevent the repeat of the 2019 widespread bloody protests.

In November 2019 a sudden increase in fuel prices led to immediate protests that turned into anti-regime unrest, with security forces killing hundreds of people.

Abbasi, who is the former head of Iran’s nuclear agency, added that for any energy policy to work, it must be tested in a smaller scale, and should be thoroughly examined, considering the realities of peoples’ lives, before scaling up to the national level.

“We need to compare people's incomes with their expenses. People in our society should not be malnourished,” he said

Struggling economically due to stiff sanctions and meager oil exports, the Islamic Republic cannot continue to provide heavily subsidized fuel and electricity, which are the cheapest in the world in par with Venezuela.

At the same time the government is fearful of mass protests by citizens who have become poorer in the past few years.