Wealth & Money Quote by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

Normal is doing a lot of political work here. When Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani insists that Iran has no "major problem" and that "life is normal", he is not offering reassurance so much as setting the terms of acceptable complaint. The phrase reads like a managerial decree: keep the public focused on fixable, technocratic issues, and keep the more explosive questions off the table.

The pivot is telling. He concedes unemployment among youth and inflation, but labels them "chronic conditions" - not crises, not failures, not symptoms of misrule. Chronic suggests something long-running and almost clinical: unpleasant, persistent, but manageable with the right regimen. That framing quietly absolves the state of urgency while still claiming responsibility ("we have to solve them") in a way that sounds competent and paternal. It is a promise that demands patience.

Context matters. Rafsanjani built his reputation as a pragmatic power broker in the Islamic Republic, a figure associated with post-war reconstruction and economic liberalization within tight political constraints. In that tradition, this quote functions as a boundary marker: the economy is a legitimate arena for debate; legitimacy, repression, corruption, and factional power struggles are not. By calling unemployment and inflation "chronic", he also signals that the pain is structural, not a spike that warrants protest. It's a rhetorical sedative - acknowledging hardship just enough to sound realistic, then downgrading it to something ordinary enough to endure.