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Onetime presidential challengers chastise Ahmadinejad’s government for mishandling the country’s economy

Source: The Wall Street Journal
March 17, 2010

DUBAI—Iran’s top opposition leaders signaled Tuesday they were trying to broaden their movement’s popular appeal by emphasizing the economic shortcomings of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government.

Mehdi Karroubi, who unsuccessfully challenged Mr. Ahmadinejad in June polls, heaped fresh criticism on the validity of the elections by highlighting what he said was the president’s poor economic stewardship. And Mir Hossein Mousavi, another opposition leader who also lost to Mr. Ahmadinejad, called on supporters to expand the opposition’s so-called Green Movement to a wider audience by, among other things, emphasizing that the current regime has mishandled the economy.

“If this movement wants to keep going and stay alive, we have to go to different segments of the society, and teach them and make them understand that economic issues are not in [the] right direction,” Mr. Mousavi’s Web site quoted him telling members of an opposition party.

One opposition operative, reached by phone in Tehran, said opposition leaders were now actively trying to use economic issues as a fresh rallying cry.

The comments from both men were delivered at the start of Iran’s annual Festival of Fire, a rite rooted in Zoroastrian tradition and celebrated with fireworks and sometimes-rambunctious bonfires.

The festival is officially banned for being un-Islamic. Many analysts had expected opposition leaders to try to use it, along with celebrations surrounding the Iranian New Year later in the month, to reignite their protest movement.

Authorities stepped up police presence in Tehran Tuesday evening, but opposition leaders didn’t call for specific protests.

After sunset, people filled the streets of cities and towns across the country, many setting off firecrackers.

On Tuesday, backers of Iran’s hardline militancy attacked Mr. Karroubi’s house in Tehran, according to news reports, and they spray-painted graffiti—including death threats—on its walls.

After a crippling government crackdown on street protests last month and a flurry of recent intimidation, opposition leaders now appear to be changing tack by trying to exploit long-simmering economic complaints to revitalize their movement, according to analysts.

“The economy [as a protest issue] has always been out there,” says Theodore Karasik, director of research and development at the Dubai-based Institute for Near East & Gulf Military Analysis, a think tank. “But they’re talking about it more.”

Iran is a major petroleum exporter but suffers from high inflation and unemployment. Before last year’s election, even many of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s conservative allies blamed the president for stoking the country’s economic woes with populist spending initiatives. Mr. Ahmadinejad has defended his policies as sound and the election as fair.

With oil prices hovering at a lofty $80 a barrel or so, Iran isn’t facing economic ruin. But the economy has languished under state control and U.S. and United Nations sanctions.

Economists have blamed the country’s high inflation in part on recent, prolific government spending.

Planned food- and fuel-subsidy reductions, to be phased in over the next five years, could exacerbate price increases, they warn.

That could provide an opening for opposition leaders. Before the election, economic policy was one of the few areas where government critics could engage in relatively open, public debate.

As protests convulsed Iran after the polls, however, conservative allies—even those opposed to the president’s economic policies—generally rallied around him.

In comments published by his Web site, Mr. Karroubi said it wasn’t credible that Mr. Ahmadinejad garnered so many votes in the June election, after so much criticism had been directed at him for Iran’s high inflation and unemployment.