Rouhani Suffers Fresh Blow After Iran’s Parliament Ousts Economy Minister Hard-liners have seized on Iran’s growing rich-poor divide and plummeting currency to gut Rouhani’s economic team By Asa Fitch in Dubai and Aresu Eqbali in Tehran, Iran
https://www.wsj.com/articles/rouhani-suffers-fresh-blow-after-irans-parliament-ousts-economy-minister-1535296186?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=8&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s
Iran’s parliament ousted the country’s economy minister Sunday, stepping up an overhaul of President Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet amid deep domestic opposition to his response to harsh new U.S. sanctions.
Mr. Rouhani, a relative moderate in Iran’s system, had surrounded himself with a cabinet of technocrats, vowing to fight corruption, promote transparency and open Iran’s economy to the West with the 2015 nuclear deal.
But after the economy faltered and the Iran deal came under threat from the Trump administration last year, hard-line opponents have seized on Iran’s growing rich-poor divide and plummeting currency to gut Mr. Rouhani’s economic team and undercut that strategy.
Slightly more than the required majority of 260 parliamentarians present on Sunday voted to fire the economy minister, Masoud Karbasian, state television reported. Parliamentarians criticized him for allegedly failing to address the currency crisis or tame high inflation, and for his unfitness to fight an economic war with the U.S. since Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal in May and began imposing new sanctions.
The move against Mr. Karbasian, who held his position for little more than a year, followed the parliament’s impeachment early this month of Mr. Rouhani’s labor minister on grounds that he failed to properly address unemployment, which the International Monetary Fund forecasts at around 12% this year.
Mr. Rouhani also removed and replaced the central bank governor, Valiollah Seif, last month after Iran’s currency fell to new lows against the dollar. It now takes around 105,000 Iranian rials to buy a dollar, compared with about 43,000 in January.
Adding to the president’s peril are waves of popular unrest that have erupted in recent months because of the economy, the largest of which took place in December and January. Labor unrest and women’s rights protests have also percolated in recent months.
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