IRANIAN President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad basked in a rock-star welcome from Hezbollah's Shiite loyalists on Wednesday, but his trip to Lebanon may offer only a brief respite from daunting challenges at home. Many among the rice-throwing Lebanese crowds on the Beirut airport road will have benefited from the $1 billion or so that Hezbollah says it received from its Iranian sponsors for reconstruction after a 2006 war with Israel. At home, Iranians often grumble that money their government lavishes on Lebanese or Palestinian militant groups would be better spent on alleviating their own hardships, set to worsen if Ahmadinejad keeps his word and slashes costly subsidies. The feisty president, however, is not easily daunted. He may shrug off his expanding array of critics as long as he can count on the blessing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Ahmadinejad, who survived a storm of popular protests after his disputed 2009 re-election, is under fire for his handling of economic problems caused in part by sanctions over an Iranian nuclear program that he has aggressively promoted. “The president has been playing a very high-stakes game with sanctions, first by almost daring the United Nations to impose them and then by pushing the line that the West cannot tolerate an independent, self-sufficient Iran, hence its rush to impose yet more sanctions,” said Gulf-based analyst Mohammed Shakeel. “While this has arguably won the day for Ahmadinejad up to now, the adverse effects of sanctions will inevitably cost him politically since Iranians will begin to link their imposition to his personal belligerence,” he said. The damage done by sanctions is hard to quantify, but they have scared off many of Iran's overseas partners, including its main petrol suppliers, constrained its ability to finance trade or import know-how, and raised the costs of doing business. Ahmadinejad, who casts himself as a champion of the poor, now has to balance his former free-spending image with the need to reform food and fuel subsidies that cost Iran nearly $100 billion a year, or a third of gross domestic product. Long-delayed action on phasing out the subsidies, due on Sept. 23, has been postponed again in a possible sign that the authorities fear fuelling inflation and sparking social unrest. Rasool Nafisi, an Iran analyst at Strayer University, Virginia, said he doubted subsidy reform would happen soon. A cash-strapped government might either devalue the rial and maintain subsidies, he argued, or scrap them and pump cash into poorer layers of the population, and “thereby enhance a certain form of class war by impoverishing the middle class even more”. Ahmadinejad has vowed to soften the impact of subsidy cuts with cash handouts to the needy, but even hardliners fault him for vagueness on the timing and details of the reforms. However, there is no sign so far that economic discontent might revive the opposition movement that blossomed after the June 2009 presidential election, only to be cowed or crushed. Yet Ahmadinejad has also alienated conservative groups such as merchants and clerics once seen as the bedrock of the revolution. Higher taxes have provoked bazaar strikes. Conservatives berate Ahmadinejad for disregarding parliament and the Guardian Council, a powerful legislative watchdog. They say his claim that the executive, not parliament, is supreme contradicts a famous dictum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late revolutionary leader who saw the assembly as a defense against dictators such as the shah he ousted in 1979.
