Iran hardliners push back amid fears of change

When police and judiciary officials turned up last week in north Tehran to shut down a newly opened restaurant billed as the city's first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, few Iranians were surprised.

To many it was obvious that the owner, who protested that his restaurant was a franchise of a Turkish company and not of the American chain, had clearly misjudged the current mood.

Iran is still far from opening up for business with the outside world.

In the past few weeks hardliners have launched a rearguard action against President Hassan Rouhani, whom they suspect of trying to steer the country towards the West and in particular the US following the recent nuclear deal.

They accuse the US, for its part, of conspiring against Iran using agents who have "infiltrated" various institutions of power to make a comeback in their country.

Anti-American rhetoric has been stepped up in all areas of public life.

And ahead of this month's annual commemoration of the storming of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, a huge new poster appeared in central Tehran in which the famous US Iwo Jima image was manipulated to show US troops planting a flag on a hill of dead bodies.

As might be expected, the hardliners have provided no evidence to back up their claims. Instead they cite the words of their ideologue, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Soon after the nuclear agreement with the US and other big powers in Vienna that sought to limit Iran's nuclear activities in return for the lifting of crippling international sanctions, he took aim at the US.

"The Americans want to use these [nuclear] talks and the agreement as a means to infiltrate Iran," Ayatollah Khamenei said at the time. "We have stopped this before and we will stop all their future attempts too. We will not allow them to infiltrate our economy or subvert our political system or our culture," he added.

Hardliners, who control many centres of power including the judiciary, the police, the Revolutionary Guard, the intelligence agencies and the state broadcaster have used their Supreme Leader's words to justify a fresh crackdown.

They have arrested several prominent journalists without saying why, although on state television their mouthpieces have accused the journalists of being "agents of US infiltration".

President Rouhani has hit back, saying the arrests smacked of attempts by one faction to silence another. He has also cut off state subsidies to hardline newspapers that have been campaigning against the nuclear deal.

His comments have received almost no coverage in the state-controlled media but they have not gone entirely unheard.

In parliament, an unusually outspoken but conservative MP, Ali Motahari, criticised the arrests as part of a new wave of attacks to intimidate and muzzle the press.

The head of the all-important Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, also said the aim of the campaign was to eliminate factional rivals.

Hardliners in the judiciary have also arrested two businessmen.

One is Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese IT expert who travelled to Iran on an official invitation from the government to take part in a symposium and the other is Siamak Namazi, a Dubai-based Iranian-American consultant.

Both have been held in recent weeks on unspecified charges.

Their arrests have sent a strong signal to the business community abroad that the trade and investment climate has not yet changed as a result of the nuclear deal.

The hardliners are deeply unhappy with the deal, which they believe has deprived Iran of the possibility of building a nuclear weapon at least for the foreseeable future.

They are also worried that President Rouhani's policy of building bridges with the outside world will lead Iran to a more pro-Western atmosphere and will ultimately strengthen his position internally.

President Rouhani proudly describes the nuclear agreement as an achievement but hardliners disagree. "What is there to be proud of in the deal?" asked Iran's head of judiciary, Sadeq Larijani, a senior cleric, this week.

The hardliners have been compelled to go along with the nuclear agreement because Ayatollah Khamenei reluctantly approved it.

He is on the record as saying he accepted the deal only because he wanted to see international sanctions lifted - sanctions that had crippled the economy and threatened the stability of the Islamic regime.

He also banned Iranian government officials from holding any talks with the US on other issues, such as the war in Syria or co-operation in the fight against the so-called Islamic State.

But expediency led him to change his mind when he quietly gave his blessing to Iran joining the talks on Syria, organised by the US Secretary of State, John Kerry.

This has brought a degree of confusion to the hardliners. They don't know whether to criticise the Syria talks or praise them.

But they are watching eagle-eyed as President Rouhani embarks on an official visit to Italy and France next week.

Tensions are already surfacing with reports of friction between Iranian and French officials over whether wine could be served, external at an official lunch for President Rouhani.

This mirrors a similar row almost exactly 16 years ago when Iran's then-president, the reformist Mohammad Khatami, visited France.

Then, as now, the capacity of a moderate Iranian president to effect change either at home or internationally remains severely curtailed by the need to counter constant pressure from the hardliners.