Iran Feature: Life Goes On in Tehran (Tehran Bureau)

"A Correspondent" writes for Tehran Bureau:

This past December, I had the chance to visit Iran. It had been two-and-a-half years since my last visit, and I was keen to observe what had changed and how my image of the country that had developed abroad differed from the realities on the ground....

[Tehran] seems little changed since 2008. There is not much new private housing construction. Similarly, there are few new shops, malls, and fancy restaurants. The proliferation of such new businesses was impressive before 2008, but no longer.

There are two major exceptions to this trend. First, major improvements in the city could be observed in the transportation sector --- new metro lines, fast bus routes, and improved traffic management have made traffic in Tehran somewhat more bearable than it was during my last visit. I took multiple trips across the city at different times of the day in one direction or another, and the traffic, while aggravating at some hours, never prolonged my trips to more than double the minimum travel time. However, there is a good chance that my observations were skewed by the timing of my visit, which corresponded both with odd/even-day traffic limits imposed to combat air pollution and the fuel price shock of subsidy reform.

Second, the growth of the private banking sector is quite evident. There are now some 30-odd bank chains in Iran, with branches of one or two on seemingly every corner. I don't know exactly how they can all make money, but borrowing money outside of Iran at low interest and lending it domestically at much higher rates -- in other words, taking advantage of the government's insistence on keeping the dollar exchange rate constant -- could be a major factor....

While politics is the most talked about aspect of Iran outside the country, the new insights I gathered from talking with people there were limited. Censorship, crackdowns, and the daily pressures of life have yielded political apathy. While there are still many Green Movement sympathizers, they are not very active, nor that hopeful, and the hot political debates that used to galvanize certain social circles attract fewer participants these days.

The major shift in power over the last few years has been the rise of Ahamdinejad's faction and its alliance with [Supreme Leader] Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Sepah (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) to oust the supporters of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and sideline the old clerical conservatives. Having weakened their major competitors --- reformists are almost completely shut out now --= and harboring potentially serious ideological and practical policy differences, many people think that there is a good chance the Khamenei and Ahmadinejad factions will face off in the coming year or two. Sepah's position in such a potential face-off is critical and, from what I have heard, not at all certain. Some suggest that Sepah has been organized so that Khamenei's command over it is hard to challenge, while others point to the increasing power of commander-merchants in its ranks who are benefiting from Ahmadinejad's administration and may prefer to align with him. Most people I talked to think that these power groups in fact behave more as economic agents than as ideological ones....

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