It wasn’t meant to be this way for ordinary Iranians

In Iraj Pezeshkzad’s much-loved Iranian novel My Uncle Napoleon, the eponymous lead character detects a British hand behind even the most innocent actions. An Indian businessman moves in across the road – ergo he is a British spy. A water tank floods after a plug is removed by an unknown hand – it is the English. A local shoeshine man disappears – he has been killed by the old enemy.

Devotees of the novel will feel that some of Uncle Napoleon’s paranoia may be justified. How Israel has managed in less than a week to identify and target a series of Iran’s military and scientific leaders – and bomb targets as far east as the shrine city of Mashhad – is a story yet to be told. ​​

There have also been cyber-attacks on Bank Sepah, which has links with the Revolutionary Guards, according to news site Entekhab.ir. Predatory Sparrow, a pro-Israel hacking group, posted on X that it had been behind the attack.

Ordinary Iranians, long used to coping with hardship, may have other, more quotidian concerns.

Inflation is over 43 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund. The rial has unsurprisingly slumped further since Israel’s missile and drone campaign began last Friday. One euro buys more than IR1 million while a dollar is worth IR930,000, according to Navasan.net. At the end of January $1 bought IR845,000.

It is little surprise that Iranians have long had recourse to gold – and crypto. Navasan carries live quotes for alternative asset classes including bitcoin, ethereum and ripple alongside different dollar rates for Tehran and Herat, western Afghanistan.

The picture is not all negative. Unemployment is a shade under 8 percent although youth unemployment is higher at 20 percent, according to Clingendael, a Dutch think tank. And as our correspondent Dania Saadi has noted, Iran, Opec’s third-largest producer, has been able to increase oil output despite Donald Trump’s vaunted “maximum pressure” sanctions.

In 2024 Iranian oil production rose 13 percent year on year to 3.3 million barrels per day, according to Opec. Exports, nearly all of which go to China, have risen to 1.8 million bpd. That is above the 1.5 million bpd achieved under the Biden administration.

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Earlier this week the Iranian parliament approved Seyed Ali Madanizadeh as the new economy minister. The conservative-dominated assembly impeached his predecessor Abdolnaser Hemmati in March because of a failure to control the depreciation of the rial.

This is an uphill task, given persistent overspending and a dysfunctional subsidy regime that means gas and electricity is virtually free to domestic users in Iran. In 2023 almost 10 million Iranians were living in poverty, according to the World Bank, while 40 percent of the rapidly ageing population was vulnerable.

It was not supposed to be this way, given the promises of the 1979 revolution and the rejection of the ostentation of the Pahlavi regime. But under Khamenei Iran has reverted to type: the clerics and the bonyads (“charitable” trusts that dominate the economy) are pocketing the country’s riches, as the landowners and rentiers did under the shah.

Uncle Napoleon, whose story was published in 1973, is a creature of that world.