Iran’s new president, Masud Pezeshkian, has expressed his willingness to hold direct talks with the United States to revive the 2015 nuclear deal, in his first press conference since taking office on July 31. This outstretched hand has been conditional on Washington showing that it is “not hostile” to Iran, a vague statement with which the president recovers one of his main campaign promises. That commitment was to resume negotiations to ease Western sanctions against the Iranian economy, a decision that depends on the reactivation of the pact that allowed international supervision of the country’s nuclear program to ensure that Tehran did not manufacture atomic weapons. Pezeshkian has not chosen just any day to appear. This Monday marks two years since the start of protests against the regime sparked by the death in police custody of Yina Mahsa Amini, 22, arrested three days earlier for wearing the mandatory veil in an “inappropriate” way.
In 2018, when Tehran was scrupulously complying with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the deal between Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China and Germany — the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the pact and reinstated those and other punitive measures. Those sanctions, along with the corruption of the Iranian regime itself, according to experts, partly caused the number of poor people in that country to double between 2020 and 2021.
In 2021, after taking office as US president, Joe Biden attempted to negotiate a revival of the nuclear pact. Tehran then refused to negotiate directly with Washington, at least publicly, although it maintained contacts through European intermediaries or Arab countries. That was before the protests sparked by Amini’s unfortunate end, which crystallized long-simmering popular anger. Over poverty and corruption, but above all over the regime’s violence, lack of freedoms and the misogyny of laws that turn Iranian women into minors for life.
The Iranian regime then defined these demonstrations as “riots” and when tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, mainly women and young people, took to the streets demanding the end of the Islamic regime, the regime responded by unleashing a repression in which at least 551 people died, 60,000 were arrested and nine hanged, according to the UN. This violence deepened the abyss between a large part of the population and its regime, which had already been evident in the successive records of electoral abstention since 2020.
Among the many grievances that Iranians have complained about against the Islamic regime that has ruled them since 1979, the authorities have only acknowledged one, without mentioning the demonstrations: the poor economic situation. One third of the Iranian population lives below the absolute poverty line, according to official figures, while the middle classes have become impoverished, mainly due to an annual inflation rate of around 35%, according to official figures.
This purely economic public reading of the gap between Iran’s political system and much of its population explains the Iranian authorities’ eagerness to improve the country’s economy in order to reduce social tension. Sanctions relief and the conclusion of a new nuclear pact now seem to be a pressing necessity for the Iranian regime, especially as the end of the 85-year-old Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his uncertain succession inexorably approach.
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A loyalist to the regime
Pezeshkian is a regime loyalist within its reformist faction, which believes that the system can be changed from within. In his remarks on Monday, he was careful to frame the nods to the United States “within the visions of the supreme leader of the revolution.” This statement is in line with what analysts have said, who assume that this rapprochement with the West has the green light from Khamenei. The nuclear negotiations are an issue in which the supreme leader has the final say.
The presence of Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s combative former foreign minister — widely seen as the architect of the 2015 nuclear deal — on Pezeshkian’s team as vice president for strategic affairs also suggests that the offer of direct negotiations with the United States has the supreme leader’s blessing. Zarif had resigned from that post in mid-August, but two weeks later he announced his return after receiving “a written order” from the president, as he confirmed on social media. Pezeshkian had previously submitted his cabinet to Khamenei for approval, before even submitting it to a vote in a parliament dominated by conservatives and ultra-conservatives. Zarif is a highly regarded diplomat in the West.
The Iranian president also alluded to another issue that analysts often link to the revival of the nuclear deal. Iran is one of three countries, along with North Korea and Myanmar, on the blacklist of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an intergovernmental body tasked with monitoring money laundering and terrorist financing. Even if international sanctions were lifted, Tehran would not be able to access the international banking system if it does not leave that list, something that depends on the approval of two legal reforms demanded by the FATF, which have been pending for years, something that will not happen without the approval of the supreme leader.
“We have to resolve the FATF issue, the JCPOA issue and any relationship with the world. Jobs and investment must be created in the country,” the Iranian president told reporters, according to the official IRNA news agency.
The focus that Pezeshkian placed on the economy and the nuclear agreement at his press conference on Monday indicates that, although the Iranian regime is willing to return to the nuclear negotiating table in order to improve the economic situation, the issue of the veil remains an untouchable ideological pillar. During his campaign, the now president partly adopted this official interpretation that reduces the causes of popular discontent in Iran to the economic situation. With nuances. The then candidate promised to include more young people and women in his future government. The average age of his government, which he presented in August, is 59 years old and there is only one female minister. Pezeshkian has also not kept his promise to abolish the morality police patrols if “it was possible.”
A journalist told him at a press conference on Monday how she had to go around several streets to avoid being arrested by the police for showing part of her hair. The president reacted with a laugh, as can be seen in a video posted on Instagram, before ironically asking if the police officers were still on the streets.
In a statement marking the second anniversary of the death of Yina Mahsa Amini, Amnesty International on Monday denounced “absolute impunity” and the progressive and alarming deterioration of the human rights situation in Iran. In the two years since Amini was left brain dead in an ambulance from a police station in Tehran, “the rights of women and girls in Iran have worsened,” the NGO stressed.
