Iran International:

As the runoff presidential vote was held on Friday, former chief of Iran’s Central Bank Abdolnaser Hemmati told local media that one of the first tasks should be reaching an agreement with the West to lift sanctions.

In the first 100 days, “it is important to establish a policy of understanding with the United States and the three European powers to reduce sanctions and thus lower inflationary expectations. The government's first step should be to suppress these inflationary expectations,” Hemmati, a critic of Iran’s hardliners stated.

Nuclear negotiations by the Biden administration and Britain, France and Germany, which started in April 2021 failed to forge a new agreement to revive the Obama-era JCPOA nuclear deal. As a result, Trump administration’s oil export and international banking sanctions remained in place seriously impacting Iran’s weak economy.

Hemmati and numerous other experts and analysts in Tehran have long called for a change of course by the Islamic government, which has increasingly adopted a more hardline posture since 2020, not only in foreign policy but also in its repressive measures against social and political freedoms. Many hope that the election of the relatively moderate Masoud Pezeshkian can bring about a measure of change in both foreign and domestic policies.

The former chief banker is considered a ‘reformist’ who was a candidate in the 2021 presidential election when the hardliner candidate Ebrahim Raisi was elected amid heavy-handed engineering of the election process. He registered as a candidate again for the latest presidential elections but the notorious Guardian Council rejected his qualification.

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