Iran Analysis: Nervous About Elections, The Regime Imprisons Journalists (Farhi)

The Iranian leaders’ desire to increase participation rates in the presidential election has usually been deemed reason enough for pre-election relative media openness. In this context, the question of whether these moves indicate that the Iranian leadership could care less about participation rates in the presidential election becomes an important one. The worry that the election might get out of control seems to be trumping the desire to elicit higher participation rates as an indicator of state legitimacy.

The way the Iranian deep security state continues to show its pre-election nervousness is nevertheless puzzling.

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Iran Feature: The Top 10 Stories of 2012 --- A Currency Falls, Sanctions Expand, and Political Prisoners Continue to Resist (Farhi)

Closed Cirrency Exchange, Summer 2012This year forcefully disproved the assumption that imprisoning political and civil society activists and critics silences them and fixes the Islamic Republic’s dissident problem.

Former presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi remained incarcerated in their homes (the former along with spouse Zahra Rahnavard) without being charged and remained mostly without any kind of access to the outside world. But letters written by political prisoners about prison conditions and solidarity among prisoners — as well as the woeful state of the country’s politics — made it out of the prisons and were sufficiently covered by external news and activist outlets for many inside Iran to become aware of them.

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Iran Feature: The Political Propaganda Around An Analysis --- "Economy Is Not on the Verge of Collapse"

Tehran Currency Market, 2 Oct 2012A very interesting media development, as Khabar Online uses its English-language website in an attempt to give the "right" view of the currency crisis....

The website reprints an article, originally published by the American site LobeLog, in which US-based economist Djavad Salehi-Isfahani pronounces, "Understanding the Rial's Freefall: Iran’s Economy is Not on the Verge of Collapse".

Salehi-Isfahani is a prominent analyst, but this piece should be read more as a political intervention than as an accurate critique of the economic situation.

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