What are the priorities for Iran’s new president?

Is there some kind of four-way competition between Tehran, Dhaka, Kabul and Ankara to win the uncoveted title of most traffic-choked world capital?

My bet’s still on Kabul to win, if so.

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But in all four you can quickly leave it all behind, in the case of the Iranian capital to drift into the warren of the city’s teeming, welcoming, covered bazaar.

It’s stifling – yes Iran too is broiling under unusually high summer temperatures the high side of 40c – but it’s where you feel the clash of  two worlds.

To the West, Iran’s become a nuclear fetish, scant evidence notwithstanding, Iran equals nuclear at the top of the US/EU agendas and scarcely anything else appears to matter in that context.

But stand here in the bazaar and ask voters: “What is the number one priority for the new president, Hassan Rouhani?”

And, yes, of course not a soul mentions the word nuclear. Women, men, young, old, trade, professional, unemployed (lots of them) they pretty much all talk about money, unemployment and… inflation, inflation and inflation.

Even the new president – inaugurated here tomorrow afternoon – told parliament, after his surprise election victory, that the inflation rate’s 42 per cent not the official 32 per cent and it could be way higher still in fact.

Of course, this is in large measure the result of UN/US/EU sanctions which are in turn the reaction to the nuclear fears embedded in Washington and Brussels denied in Tehran.

Only on Wednesday US lawmakers voted 400 to 20 for yet more noose-tightening on Iranian oil exports. The lawmakers clearly didn’t get, or care for, the letter from intelligence, military and diplomatic officials in the US saying now might be the time for a gesture for the incumbent.

Instead he got whacked on the Hill, not welcomed. But could there yet be a gesture in the coming weeks for President Rouhani in a veto from President Obama as the UN General Assembly convenes in the autumn? Wouldn’t that be an initiative?

So sanctions work, if working is collective punishment of millions for the perceived (not proven) nuclear bomb-making dreams of the government few. And specifically for the government failing to be fully open with nuclear inspectors.

But Iran is far from going under. In the bazaars the famous rugs cannot be sold any more on the huge US market.

Oh yeah? But they sure as hell can be sent to India, reflagged as Indian-made and wind up on the living-rooms of Foggy Bottom and Manhattan all the same.

“Who cares?” a trader explains, “we still get paid.”

Not all customers care or want to look beyond the price to the detail, warp and weft.

Speaking of India, she like China stepped willingly into the sanctions opportunity – Iranian iron ore, cement, hell yes even the wonderful pistachio nuts are finding new markets of necessity, mitigating some of the economic pain.

But it’s tough. As we film an engineering graduate whispers questions about how to get savings abroad into hard currency and how to acquire a credit card or foreign bank account and…and…and…

I have no answers.

With healthy currency reserves Iran plc will stand all this for the forseeable. The pain’s on the streets and in the businesses, but Iran’s not about to sink.

Can the Glasgow graduate reduce all this misery, get a deal on sanctions yet preserve the right to nuclear programmes state and many voters see as inviolable?

Professor of political Science at Tehran University S. Zibakalam says:

“Look, he has a tightrope to walk, there’s no doubt about it. But if he can create at least some trust, just some trust at last in the nuclear talks – that will be real progress”

In short President Rouhani has great expectations, for change, for calm after the shrill radicalism of President Ahmadinejad , holocaust-denial and wiping Israel off the map etc.

That rhetoric’s not the new man’s style or substance – but delivery of a way out of crippling economic warfare is way, way harder than toning down the verbal assaults.

To some extent therefore President Rouhani’s predicament mirrors that of another president of what was termed here the Great Satan in those shriller times: how arrive on a wave of hope and live up to it all?

Great expectations indeed – but check against delivery. Hope and reality do not always live in the same world – ask our Iranians in the Tehran bazaar.

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