Iran is under acute social, political and economic stress. Its rulers will be under pressure if they retaliate against Israel, or if they don’t.
At the end of this week, there were hopes that Iran might hold fire in a wider trade-off deal to cease hostilities and exchange prisoners in Gaza. But even then, the regime’s inflated retribution rhetoric has been falling short.
While ambassador Sadeghi’s offensive tweets reaffirmed why Iran had a low standing among many countries, more worryingly for him, they’re at odds with concerns within the regime about the ramifications of a mooted attack on Israel.advised Ayatollah Khamenei that attacking Israel again will invite a major response that will cause significant infrastructure damage which will further harm Iran’s faltering economy – a point unusually made directly to Tehran by the US. But the problems go deeper.
President Ebrahim Raisi’s death in a helicopter accident mid-May, and the subsequent election saw the regime desperate for a high voter turnout as a signal of seeming legitimacy. In a sign that Ayatollah Khamenei’s instincts of regime self-preservation are still present, he allowed so-called moderate Pezeshkian to run.
Though Azeri by birth, and a critic of hard-line responses to the protests, Pezeshkian is part of the system. His main challenge is to manage the real tensions between the emerging cadre of ambitious young hardliners and meeting the demands for greater social freedoms while delivering economic opportunities. The usual political trade-offs may not be enough this time.
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