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Iran’s ruling elite spent last week speaking with an unusual directness—less candor than fatigue. Senior officials who once wrapped every budget gap in ideological language now concede the state cannot fund its own commitments. Prices must rise, they say. Subsidies must be cut. Inflation is inescapable. And alongside those admissions, the country’s infrastructure keeps revealing a deeper truth: the government that insists on extracting more from society no longer has the capacity to deliver even minimal services in return.
The clearest signal came on Friday, November 15, when Mohammad-Jafar Ghaempanah, executive deputy to the regime’s president Masoud Pezeshkian, told state media that electricity, gas, and gasoline “must become more expensive.” He framed this not as policy preference but as economic inevitability—“it makes no difference which government is in office,” he said. Even regime-friendly outlets acknowledged the political risk. Khabar Fori reported that the government intends to move ahead with price hikes “even if public dissatisfaction grows.”
Those warnings land in a society where confidence in state management is already threadbare. Two days earlier, the nation watched another crisis of basic competence unfold. On November 13–14, hundreds of passengers on the Tehran–Bandar Abbas train were trapped for more than 10 hours near Sirjan after two freight cars derailed. Passengers said they were left without water, food, ventilation, or permission to exit the carriages to use the bathroom. State rail officials blamed a “technical issue,” but the scandal was not the derailment—it was the total absence of crisis response. No buses were mobilized; no water was delivered. Videos posted online showed exhausted families describing conditions as “inhumane.” It quickly became shorthand for the country’s administrative breakdown: a government that can raise tariffs but cannot organize a bottle of drinking water.
#Iran Enters the Ration Economy as Food, Fuel and Medicine Slip Beyond Reachhttps://t.co/LRyoRZz0gv
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) November 12, 2025
Fiscal weakness is visible across sectors. A parliamentary research report acknowledged a 176,000-teacher shortage for the current academic year, along with a 102,000-classroom deficit nationwide. These figures are not temporary gaps; they are structural failures in a system that has underinvested in education for more than a decade. More than 13.5 million students are squeezed into overcrowded classrooms because the state cannot fund staffing or construction. A nation that once presented human-capital development as a pillar of national strength is now unable to hire enough teachers to run its schools.
Pezeshkian added to the week’s disclosures in a November 11 speech, admitting that Iran’s chronic budget deficit forces the government to “print money,” and that “printing money means inflation.” It was a plain explanation of why inflation remains stuck near 50%, but it also revealed the limits of his own administration’s toolbox: the government cannot cut spending without igniting unrest, cannot raise revenue without squeezing a society already at the edge, and cannot borrow externally without political concessions it refuses to make. His invocation of mosque-centered or “neighborhood-centered” mobilization sounded less like governance than improvisation—a way of outsourcing state functions to communities because formal institutions no longer work.
Even former insiders now describe the situation as unprecedented. On November 14, Mohsen Aminzadeh, a former deputy foreign minister, said Iran was in the “most critical economic condition since the revolution,” citing a “governance vacuum” and a lack of preparedness for renewed international pressure or sanctions snapback. His comments, carried by domestic political reporters, underscored what officials rarely say aloud: the state is no longer capable of sustaining its own economic model.
#Iran’s Economic Unraveling Deepens as Currency Falls and Scandals Multiply https://t.co/BD3sOuHtHL
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) November 11, 2025
The household-level data are harsher. Labor analysts estimate the national poverty line above 55 million tomans per month, while the legal minimum wage remains under 15 million. The basic cost-of-living basket exceeds 24 million, meaning even households with two full-time wage earners fall into deficit every month. In practice, families fill the gap with informal work, multiple jobs, debt, or skipped essentials. None of these are sustainable. And as always, official data—and even regime-adjacent analytics—tend to understate the gravity of the crisis.
When viewed together, the week’s signals point toward a single trend line: Iran’s government is preparing to extract more from a population that has less, while possessing fewer tools to manage the fallout. Ghaempanah’s statement that subsidy cuts are “unavoidable” is not economic policy—it is a confession that the state cannot afford its own political bargains. The train debacle exposes the administrative hollowing-out behind every austerity measure. The teacher shortage shows the long-term cost of treating social spending as discretionary. And the poverty figures reveal the widening gap between official rhetoric and lived reality.
#Iran's Regime Floats Tehran Evacuation Contingency as Water Runs Outhttps://t.co/LRTfl2An9A
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) November 10, 2025
What makes these trends politically dangerous is not simply that the economy is deteriorating. It is that officials are now saying openly that deterioration is the baseline. Tehran is no longer promising improvement or even stabilization. It is promising endurance—endurance of inflation, endurance of shortages, endurance of mismanagement. But endurance is precisely what millions of households running structural monthly deficits cannot offer.
The past week did not produce a single dramatic event; instead, it exposed a cumulative truth. Iran’s governing model is reaching a point where it can neither subsidize legitimacy nor successfully withdraw those subsidies. Austerity without administrative capacity becomes not policy but pressure. And pressure, in a system already strained by distrust, is inherently unstable.