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MP Mehdi Kouchakzadeh confronts Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf during a heated public session of the regime’s Majlis
Four-minute read
As international snapback tightens, Tehran’s narrative is splitting in two. One camp soothes—insisting sanctions won’t bite and urging calm—while another, from regime media to industry insiders, now concedes strategic and economic failure. The government has quietly approved gradual gasoline price hikes—a direct hit to household budgets that contradicts pre-election pledges—just as state-linked figures admit food prices far above global norms and regulators formally raise chicken prices. The through-line is not policy confidence but message management: downplay to defuse panic, admit enough to shift blame, and pass costs to the street.
Admission from within
The most striking fissure came in print. Jomhouri Eslami wrote on October 12, “In reality… Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was a mistake,” before acknowledging “the destruction of Gaza—80 percent of buildings and all infrastructure.” The paper went further, arguing that “Syria [has been] taken out and swallowed by the U.S. and Israel,” that Israel has “penetrated south Lebanon,” and that a U.S.-aligned government has emerged in Beirut. For a house organ that typically amplifies the system’s line, these are not semantic quibbles; they are a public audit of strategic loss.
That admission matters for two reasons. First, it punctures a year of triumphalist rhetoric about “resistance wins” by conceding that the costs—material, political, and reputational—have outpaced returns. Second, it arrives precisely as snapback measures tighten, reinforcing a perception among elites that escalation has reduced options rather than expanded them.
#Iran’s Bravado Masks Strategic Paralysis and a Volatile Societyhttps://t.co/3l5a20KWbV
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) October 10, 2025
Friday pulpits double down
If the daily sketched limits, the pulpits tried to erase them. In Karaj on October 10, Friday prayer leader Mohammad-Mehdi Hamedani dismissed Western demands outright: “Iran will not bargain or negotiate about its deterrent and defensive power,” he said, ridiculing calls to curb missile range—“as short as a bow and arrow.” He downplayed UN snapback’s bite relative to U.S. sanctions, citing oil sales “above two million barrels a day” during Ebrahim Raisi’s tenure to argue resilience.
In Tehran the same day, Mohammad-Javad Haj-Ali Akbari mocked the idea of returning to IAEA cooperation: “It is laughable they tell us to cooperate with the IAEA… The missile program has nothing to do with you. We are strong and will be stronger.” From Qom, Hashem Hosseini-Bushehri warned citizens not to panic in currency and gold markets, framing snapback as psychological warfare designed to “separate the people from the system.”
Taken together, the sermons serve a political function beyond foreign signaling. They seek to stiffen a demoralized base, discourage market jitters from turning into street agitation, and reframe isolation as proof of principle rather than policy failure.
#Iran’s Regime Cuts Subsidies for 3 Million Families, Pushing a Volatile Society Closer to Eruptionhttps://t.co/CUxZhOOiuq
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) August 24, 2025
The money trail that won’t come home
On October 11, the economic picture collided with the pulpit messaging. Hossein Samsami, a member of parliament’s Economic Committee, rebutted the president’s complaint of scarce hard currency by alleging a massive compliance gap: “In the past seven years nearly $100 billion in export currency has not returned,” he wrote, breaking the figures down further—$95.6 billion unreturned from roughly $270 billion in non-oil exports since 2018, and $56 billion missing since 2022 alone.
For a system urging citizens to ignore exchange-rate spikes, those numbers land with force. They imply not only enforcement failure and policy capture—private beneficiaries keeping proceeds offshore—but also a reduced capacity to cushion households against the very sanctions pressure the pulpits tell them to dismiss. If snapback compounds financial choke points, the missing billions magnify the domestic cost.
Can Khamenei Quell #Iran’s Restive Society through Executions?https://t.co/tAppDfknuC
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) February 5, 2024
Storm ahead
On September 17, 2025, the cabinet approved—and on October 5 notified—a decree to raise gasoline prices progressively, a move confirmed by state media on October 11. The stated aim is to narrow the price gap with CNG and steer consumption toward cheaper fuel. Politically, the cadence matters: “gradual” is designed to avoid a sudden spark while achieving the same fiscal end—households will pay more, and inflationary pass-through will follow across transport, food, and services.
The pain at the checkout is not hypothetical. On October 12, the poultry union’s managing director announced the official consumer price for chicken at 135,700 tomans per kilo, alongside a higher input cost for day-old chicks. Ministers call these jumps “logical,” but the social texture says otherwise: Tehran butchers describe families sharing a single drumstick, a rising market for “chicken scraps,” and customers saving chicken tails to render cooking fat—vignettes of erosion in purchasing power that undercut the “nothing to see here” line.
On October 11, Salar Saket, a member of the regime-aligned Rice Processing Association, said out loud what consumers already know: domestic policy has “wrecked” the rice market, pushing Iranian varieties to roughly $3/kg—about triple comparable international quotes around $1.00–$1.10, and still well above his own adjusted ceiling ($1.30–$1.40) even after accounting for lower productivity. Translated into today’s exchange rate, he argued Iranian rice should be 150–160k tomans/kg, yet retails near 300k—a spread he pins on government mismanagement, not global forces. It’s an unusual, public in-house indictment of the state’s market stewardship.
#Iran’s conflicting state media outlets sing in chorus in warning against restive societyhttps://t.co/A3XVB0w40J
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) October 6, 2023
Downplay vs. admission, with the street in the middle
Stack these moves next to the week’s rhetoric and the split is clear. Pulpits downplay snapback and mock oversight to project steadiness; house press and sectoral insiders admit failure—on the region, on pricing, on enforcement—because the gaps are now too obvious to deny. The gasoline decree converts strategic isolation into monthly budget pain; the chicken price order and the rice concession signal that officials expect households to absorb more—and soon. For a volatile society that has repeatedly mobilized around prices and dignity, this is not just an economic story; it is the tinder policymakers say they fear, managed with a mix of soothing words and cost-shifting rules that pull in opposite directions.