Apr 3, 2016

Iranian newspapers have come back from a two-week Nowruz vacation ready to renew old partisan fights with new talking points. While websites and news agencies continued to cover the significant stories of the country, it is the print media where the partisan divide is the most obvious. This year it seems that the US presidential elections have sparked an early row.

“The wisest plan of crazy [Donald] Trump is tearing up the nuclear deal,” Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the hard-line Kayhan newspaper, told Fars News Agency when asked about the Republican front-runner’s opposition to the nuclear deal. Shariatmadari called the nuclear deal a “golden document” for the United States but insisted that for Iran it has caused nothing but “damages, humiliation and deception.” Instead of making proclamations, Shariatmadari invited the administration to show one achievement of the nuclear deal.

While the director general for political affairs of the Foreign Ministry, Hamid Baeidinejad, responded that Shariatmadari’s comments were surprising, it was Reformist Arman Daily that compared Shariatmadari to Trump, who is sometimes simply referred to as “crazy Trump” in Iranian media. In the front-page story titled “What Shariatmadari and Trump have in common,” Arman Daily wrote that Trump’s opposition to the nuclear deal has made “domestic critics happy,” and that Shariatmadari “once again become one voice with American extremists.”

Two and a half months after the implementation of the nuclear deal, there still continue to be serious disagreements within Iran over its achievements. In an interview with Iranian television April 2, Abbas Araghchi, deputy foreign minister and chief of staff for the implementation of the nuclear deal, appears to also be tasked with the job of asking Iranians to be patient to see the results of the deal.

Araghchi said all the sanctions that were planned to be removed have been removed, but warned it would take time for Iran to get back to where it was pre-sanctions, given that they went from selling 2.5 million barrels a day to 1 million barrels. Perhaps showing frustration with domestic criticism, Araghchi said, “The West promised to lift oil sanctions — they did not promise to find us oil customers.”