FT:
When President Hassan Rouhani unveiled this year’s budget his intention was to shine a spotlight on Iranian state funding for institutions under the influence of his hardline opponents. Instead, his attempt at transparency inadvertently stoked public anger that helped to trigger the biggest anti-regime protests in almost a decade.
As disgruntlement festered over rising living costs and complaints grew louder that Mr Rouhani had failed to back his promises of reform, the budget exposed the large amounts of taxpayers’ cash allocated to religious institutions and other entities affiliated to factions within the Islamic regime.
One example Iranians picked up on was the 31.1tn rials ($853m) proposed for about a dozen institutions that promote Islam and the ideological foundations of the Islamic regime. This was a nominal increase of 9 per cent on the previous year and almost the equivalent to the amounts earmarked for the foreign and culture ministries.
At the same time, the December budget, which has to be approved by parliament by March, proposed increasing fuel prices by as much as 50 per cent and amending the welfare system in a move that could end monthly state payments for more than 30m people.
Iranians typically ignore what is a complicated budget process in an opaque financial system. But this time they paid attention as people used social media to post extracts of the spending plans to expose perceived injustices. It lit a fuse after years of frustration with a theocratic regime among a young, urbanised population fed up with corruption, stubbornly high unemployment and irksome social restrictions.
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“Where has that money gone?” asked Saeed Laylaz, a reform-minded economist, citing the hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenue the Islamic republic has received since 2005.
“There are 35m people under the poverty line and 3.2m people who sleep hungry every night.”