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Inside Iran’s ruling establishment, the hardline explanation for economic collapse is increasingly blunt: the real enemy is corruption, rent-seeking and incompetent management—not the strategic course imposed by the regime itself.
Hassan Rahimpour Azghadi, a member of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution and one of the establishment’s ideological voices, has repeatedly invoked the regime’s own scandals to make that case. In one published address, Rahimpour denounced banks handing a handful of people loans worth hundreds or thousands of billions of tomans without meaningful guarantees, while ordinary borrowers face relentless pressure over comparatively tiny debts. He asked why officials who authorized such lending were not held responsible.
The accusation is useful because it relocates responsibility. Economic misery, in this narrative, does not demonstrate that the regime’s strategic policies have become economically unsustainable. It demonstrates that corrupt managers have betrayed those policies.
The same argument appears in parliament. MP Hossein Samsami told Mehr that persistent currency instability was caused by “wrong domestic policies, not foreign pressure”, while other lawmakers have blamed inflation and shortages on defective management, privileged importers and inadequate supervision. Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf has himself spoken of “mafias” obstructing economic policy and acknowledged profound dysfunction inside the banking system.
The economic accusation quickly becomes political. Officials who advocate reducing sanctions pressure are portrayed as people prepared to surrender enrichment, missile capabilities and other “pillars of power” merely to compensate for their own mismanagement.
"The clerical dictatorship in Iran faces a convergence it cannot resolve through messaging. The rial is plunging despite official assurances, deficit financing is being acknowledged from inside the executive branch, and livelihood #IranProtests are spreading," writes…
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 2, 2026
The message is convenient: do not question the strategic decisions made at the top; blame the officials implementing them.
The rival faction turns exactly the same method against the hardliners.
On August 28, 2026, the regime’s president Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran’s imports and exports had fallen roughly 25 to 35 percent. Responding to those claiming sanctions have little economic effect, he mocked their reasoning: “Reason is a good thing,” he said, adding that denying the consequences of sanctions contradicted observable reality.
This current argues not merely that sanctions hurt. It argues that powerful people profit from keeping Iran sanctioned.
Pezeshkian made the accusation explicit during his presidential campaign. As Shargh reported, he contrasted ordinary Iranians living under decades of hardship with officials, their families and what he called “sanctions profiteers” enjoying comfortable lives while demanding continued sacrifice from society.
When Mojtaba Khamenei forbids the "#IranWar or negotiation” binary, both camps defy him within days. The new Leader’s word is no longer final. The pillar that once capped factional war is fracturing.
Analysis by @MehdiOghbaihttps://t.co/l4x1BQDA5V— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 1, 2026
Former minister Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi went further, estimating that sanctions add roughly 33 percent to transaction costs, amounting to tens of billions of dollars annually, which he said flows into the pockets of sanctions intermediaries.
The so-called reformist commentators have repeatedly pointed toward the opaque commercial networks required to sell oil, move currency and import goods outside normal banking channels. A commentary published by Shargh identified “powerful sanctions profiteers” as one reason de-escalation repeatedly encounters domestic resistance.
This camp therefore has its own convenient diagnosis: sanctions generate scarcity; scarcity generates intermediaries; intermediaries generate enormous rents—and some powerful actors have acquired a financial interest in permanent confrontation.
But this is not a clean struggle between a “pro-negotiation” faction and a “pro-war” faction.
Both are factions of the same authoritarian system, searching for a strategy that preserves it.
Mojtaba Orders Iran’s Factions to Stop Fighting as Pezeshkian Uses #Economic Crisis to Press for Talks
by @MansoreGolestan https://t.co/BF4MO3L3GL— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) August 29, 2026
One believes accumulated economic pressure has become dangerous enough that sanctions must be reduced before hardship destabilizes the regime. The other believes retreat would threaten the regime more profoundly by sacrificing the strategic assets and authority on which its power rests.
And each uses public misery as evidence against the other.
The hardline camp says sanctions are an excuse: corruption, exchange-rate manipulation, bad management and officials fascinated with the West are destroying the economy.
Its rivals say corruption thrives precisely because sanctions have created opaque markets, monopolistic middlemen and privileged access unavailable to ordinary businesses.
Both diagnoses contain substantial truth.
Sanctions constrain trade, investment and finance and create lucrative circumvention networks. Corruption, banking dysfunction, monopoly and political patronage independently drain Iran’s wealth. More importantly, they frequently reinforce one another.
"State-affiliated media in Iran have recently acknowledged what ordinary Iranians have experienced for years: the country’s #economic resilience is weakening," Farid Mahoutchi writes.https://t.co/fZKKlfQMkn
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) August 27, 2026
What neither faction explains is why corruption becomes intolerable mainly when the corrupt belong to the opposing faction—or why the suffering of ordinary Iranians becomes urgent principally when it helps one ruling bloc discredit another.
For an increasingly deprived society, these mutual accusations provide a final, undeniable political education. The choice is no longer about which corrupt faction gets to rescue the system. A regime indicted so thoroughly by its own camps is irredeemably rotten to its core and cannot be saved. The Iranian people know the mirage of internal reform is dead; true salvation for the country lies not in fixing the clerical dictatorship, but in its absolute, unequivocal, and complete overthrow.