Page 5 - IRANRptAug21

On the political front, the election of conservative Ebrahim Raisi as president of Iran has driven home a harsh fact for the international community: the Islamic Republic will not be undergoing its long hoped for transformational reform in the near future. Raisi’s presidency starts with his inauguration on August 5. It solidifies conservative control over Iran’s elected institutions and unelected organisations under the purview of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Iran's supreme leader on July 28 raised concerns that Washington has given no guarantee that should Tehran agree to a revival of the 2015 nuclear deal, the US will not at some point abandon the pact again. The issue is a challenging one given that it is not feasible that the current Biden administration in the US could erect an immovable barrier to a successor administration pulling the US out of the nuclear deal, or JCPOA, a second time. Tehran is still raw over how Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, broke international convention in May 2018, at a time when UN inspectors said Iran was in full compliance with the JCPOA, unilaterally ending American participation in the multilateral accord painstakingly negotiated by Iran and six major powers. To Iranian hardline politicians, who will have control of the presidency as well as the parliament, the move simply confirmed their contention that the US is never to be trusted.
The sixth round of indirect talks in Vienna between Tehran and Washington on reviving the JCPOA adjourned on June 20, two days after hardline cleric Ebrahim Raisi was elected president of the Islamic Republic. There is as yet no word on when the next round of negotiations will resume.
On July 29, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the nuclear talks with Iran "cannot go on indefinitely" but that Washington was "fully prepared" to continue negotiations.
Looking ahead, the Institute of International Finance (IFF) forecast that should the signatories to the original JCPOA manage to agree a comprehensive new nuclear agreement that moves beyond the 2015 terms, Iran would see GDP expand by 4.3% this year and by 5.9% and 5.8% in 2022 and 2023, respectively.
If Tehran and the major powers fail to strike any agreement to revive the JCPOA, unemployment in Iran would likely remain in double digits and there would be subued economic growth of 1.8% this year, the IIF estimated.
5 IRAN Country Report August 2021 www.intellinews.com