Iran’s presidential election on May 19 will in all likelihood be won by the incumbent, the moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani. In 2015, two years after he came to power, Rouhani pulled the country back from the brink of confrontation with the West when he guided Iran toward the historic nuclear deal with the Obama administration. For Iran, the agreement—which it reached with the United States, the four other permanent members of the UN Security Council, and Germany—was supposed to bring its economy in from the cold after the bellicose and isolationist presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. According to the terms of the deal, many tough international sanctions on Iran were lifted in exchange for Iran’s mothballing of some of its main nuclear facilities; at last, foreign cash was supposed to flow in and the country’s lucrative oil reserves to flow out. So a Rouhani victory this month might seem like fair reward.
But the economic miracle that was promised by the Rouhani government hasn’t happened, and the sense of anti-climax is palpable—a disillusionment that has broadened into a general contempt for politics, politicians, and promises that aren’t kept. Whether in Tehran or far-flung areas such as Khuzestan—an oil-rich province in the south that nonetheless suffers from chronic electricity and water outages, and whose inhabitants complain of neglect by the central government—there is widespread skepticism of the state’s determination to improve the lot of the ordinary Iranian. [...]
Few of Iran’s current ills can in fact be traced to the Rouhani administration, which, on the whole, has played a poor hand well. But the government is paying the price for raised expectations of an influx of foreign investment, which—notwithstanding President Donald Trump’s claims that Iran has been making hay since the lifting of sanctions—has signally failed to materialize. Investors fear that the new US administration and the US courts will continue to punish multinationals—including banks and oil companies—that have extensive dealings with Iran.
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