Middle East Monitor

In a national survey conducted in Iran, 92 per cent of Iranian citizens have expressed their dissatisfaction with the current situation in their country. The survey included a poll of Iranians’ opinions on various issues, and its results have not yet been published in full, but the National Projects Office of the Iranian Research Centre for Culture, Art and Communications released some of them to researchers, and these were published by Ham-Mihan on Sunday.

The National Projects Office conducted the survey in November last year among a sample of 15,878 people. In the “Societal Issues and Diseases” section of this survey, which is the fourth of its kind in Iran, questions were presented to the respondents covering various issues and risks, including the most important environmental risk, the security of personal property in the country, the feeling of security on the streets and job security.

In response to a question about the most important issue in the country, 81.9 per cent of those surveyed said that it was high prices and inflation, followed by unemployment, 47.9 per cent; addiction 26.9 per cent; economic and administrative corruption, 13.1 per cent; housing 12.1 per cent; the hijab by 11.9 per cent; marriage of young men and women, 10.7 per cent; divorce, 7.1 per cent; water scarcity, 5.7 per cent; and failure to comply with the law, 4.7 per cent. Moreover, 4.2 per cent also considered the most important issue facing the country to be restricting freedom of expression and the media, while 2.6 per cent said pollution and sandstorms.

With 92 per cent of Iranians expressing their dissatisfaction with the country’s conditions, 61.6 per cent said that this situation should be improved through reforms, but 30.2 per cent of them said that reforms will not improve the situation and the country is “unreformable”. Only 8.2 per cent expressed satisfaction with the current situation.

Ham-Mihan quoted social researcher Matin Ramezankhah as saying that despite the high level of dissatisfaction, about 62 per cent of Iranians still hope for an improvement in the situation.

Iranian citizens are living in difficult economic conditions as a result of accumulated economic crises exacerbated by the US sanctions imposed on the country since 2018 following the US withdrawal from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement.

Moreover, Iran has witnessed multiple mass protests in recent years, the most prominent of which were the widespread protests that the country witnessed in late 2022 following the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, hours after she was detained by the morality police in Tehran on charges of not wearing the hijab. This has become a major issue in the country.