Iran’s Immoderate ‘Moderate’
Iran’s Immoderate ‘Moderate’ 14 shares A Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has now been in office for more than four years. Yet he hasn’t fulfilled any of the major domestic-reform pledges that got him elected in 2013 and re-elected earlier this year. Those pledges won him the decisive backing of urban, secular-minded, middle class Iranians–and plaudits in the West. Yet Iranians are no more free than they were four years ago, and the Islamic Republic is still the same security state that it was then. Rouhani’s ballot-box triumph, then, was enough to give the regime a smiling, reasonable visage, and to reduce rising discontent, but not enough to effect any meaningful change. The president’s apologists have a new theory to explain this mismatch between rhetoric and reality. Under pressure from some of his own allies, they claim, Rouhani has been trying to distance himself from the reformists inside the regime while seeking to appease its hard-line,...
