As Iran heads to the polls in the June 2021 presidential election, the economy has replaced human rights as a major concern for citizens, including members of the middle class whose hopes for an easing of restrictions, which mobilized the youth and female votes in previous elections, have taken a back seat this year.
As the largest social class with the most education, Iran’s middle class is a strong voting group. In 1997, when Iran elected its first moderate president, Mohammad Khatami, the middle class accounted for only 30.5 percent of the population and 56.1 percent of the educated population of voting age. By 2011, they had doubled their share of the population to 59.8 percent and of educated voters to 80.9 percent.
A decade of economic stagnation caused by sanctions and broken international promises has brought Iran’s middle class to a point that it may reconsider its future as a force for political moderation and globalization.
Within months of the imposition of sanctions, the value of Iran’s currency collapsed, unleashing inflation that undermined the gains in the living standards of ordinary Iranians, including the middle class.
What brought Iran to the negotiating table in 2013 was not the economic distress caused by the Obama administration’s sanctions, rather it was a popular desire on the part of Iran’s middle class for economic improvement through access to the global economy, if not through better relations with the West.
In 2013, with strong middle-class support, President Hassan Rouhani was elected to negotiate a nuclear accord with the U.S., a key demand of the electorate. His victory was not borne of economic distress but of hope.
Shortly after the first Covid-19 wave struck Iran last year, the middle class became a victim of the double casualties that hit the country. Iranian companies were forced to downsize amid the combined onslaught of a fiscal freefall triggered by crushing US sanctions, and a pandemic that exacerbated the country’s economic misery.
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