Iran is gearing up for a presidential election tomorrow, but many young people are more focused on the daily struggle to survive and their dreams for the future.
Jobs are scarce in a recession-hit economy battered by sanctions, a crisis exacerbated by the region’s deadliest outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The prosperity and opening that many had hoped for after Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal never materialized because it was torpedoed when former US president Donald Trump was in office.
Photo: AFP
The Islamic republic is a country of 83 million people, almost half of whom are younger than 30, born long after the 1979 revolution.
Agence France-?Presse spoke with several Iranians in their 20s and 30s in Tehran’s affluent north and bustling downtown area about their hopes, fears and aspirations.
Nursing student Narges, 20, was spending time with her classmates outside a popular burger joint in northern Tehran’s Tajrish Square.
“Life is hard,” she said, as “living costs are back-breaking and a trip to the supermarket empties the bank [account].”
“But it still has its beauties,” she said, chuckling, adding that she likes to browse Tehran’s many bookstores and, occasionally, impulse-buy sweets.
The nuclear deal was shaping up when Narges was still in high school, she said, adding that back then, she expected that the “country is going to get colorful.”
“But, well, it didn’t,” she said.
The lack of a “bright outlook” has made her consider moving back in with her parents — or even to leave Iran, an idea she once rejected.
“I was someone who didn’t want to leave, who believed in ‘stay and build,’ but not anymore,” she said.
This is the first election in which Narges is old enough to vote, but she said that she did not have “any particular feelings” about it.
Fellow nursing student Nahid, 22, said that she “neither felt super great before, nor so bad right now that I would want to leave... I think this is life — it just goes on.”
Mohammad Hekmat, 34, who has been trained in metallurgy, was peddling roses and daffodils under a hot summer sun in a city park.
Hekmat moved to Tehran about a decade ago after he could not find a job in his northern hometown of Qaem Shahr.
“I imagined this to be a metropolis, with the chance to grow and find a job, have a future,” he said, clutching flowers left unsold the previous day. “But it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it. Suddenly everything changed. Not just for me, but for everyone.”
He earns just enough for food and a rented room on Tehran’s eastern outskirts.
“It’s like you can’t think of the future, just the present, to stay alive,” he added.
In Friday’s election, he said, he hopes that whoever wins the presidential election would be able to revive the battered Iranian economy.
Hekmat’s dream is to “have children, a future and grow old” in comfort — but he said that this would be impossible “unless the economy is fixed.”
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