Analysis by PMOI/MEK
Iran, May 20, 2021—While the Iranian regime has pushed the people into poverty and misery by stealing public wealth and squandering national assets on nefarious projects, it continues to plunge its hands deeper into the people’s pockets every day under various pretexts to steal what little they have left.
Inflation and high prices caused by the regime’s institutional thefts are affecting more and more deprived people. “Every day the people’s backs are bending more and more under the economic, livelihood and unemployment tsunami,” Arman daily wrote on May 2.
Until now, the regime has been trying to make everything more expensive, except the price of bread, so that, with minimal access to bread, it may delay the eruption of hunger and poverty protests.
But now the regime’s treasury is empty and its inability to pay the high costs of its repressive apparatus and terrorism has become so serious that it has recently decided to raise the price of bread.
Of course, Iranian regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his regime did not do this over a night, and for a long time they were preparing for it. And they use the media to cautiously and gradually prepare the grounds for the price increase.
“There is news of a 50-percent increase in bread,” the state-run Jahan-e Sanat daily reported on May 17. “We deny any increase in the price of bread!” an official claimed, according to IRIB news agency, May 10.
“The price of bread became more expensive, secretly,” Mehr news agency reported on May 15. Then the agency shamelessly added: “The bakers themselves have increased the price of bread.”
Meanwhile, an economy official admitted that bakers are faced with severe problems and told the Khabarban website in November 2020: “Expenses such as water, electricity, gas, insurance, flour transportation, etc. have increased by 30 to 40 percent.”
Then on May three, Bourson, another state-run website hintingly asks: “Is a 100-percent increase in the price of bread on the way?”
And as the media and regime officials continue to cause confusion, the regime has practically increased the price of bread in the past months.
“Studies indicate a silence rise in bread prices,” the Bourseon website acknowledged in its May 3 report.
But the mullahs know they are playing with fire, because they have been down this path before. In November 2019, after more than a year of psychological games, the regime decided to impose a sudden hike on the price of gasoline. The move triggered public outrage among a population that is already frustrated and fed up with the regime’s tyranny and corruption. The result was the largest nationwide uprising Iran has seen since the 1979 revolution.
It is very clear that regime officials are worried about the situation might spark another nationwide uprising.
Now the rise in the price of bread, which is the last food on the table of the deprived workers and people, creates a situation that the state newspapers warn about: “The fundamental economic system’s malfunction has created large gaps in terms of wealth and income and have caused severe dissatisfaction among different segments of the population, which can pose serious challenges to peace!” according to the Donya-e-eqtesad daily, May 18.
