TEHRAN — As a college student studying mechanics, Hamidreza Faraji had expected after graduation to land a steady job with a fixed salary, a pension plan and the occasional bonus. He envisioned coming home at 6 p.m.
to his family and vacationing at a resort on the Caspian Sea.
But Mr. Faraji, 34, has long since given up on all that. These days, he said, the only people who lead such predictable lives are government employees. Their jobs are well paid and offer security, but are hard to get in part because older employees stay on well past retirement age, limiting opportunities for the next generation.
So millions of Iranians, particularly younger ones, find themselves caught like Mr. Faraji in a vicious cycle of hidden poverty, an exhausting hustle to stay afloat, working multiple jobs and running moneymaking schemes just to keep up. The youth unemployment rate is 30 percent.
“Seeking opportunities, and trying to make the best of them,” Mr. Faraji said when asked about how he supported himself and his wife. A baby is on the way — “that just happened” — but they have no idea how they are going to pay for the additional costs with the money he makes as a small-time trader.
TEHRAN — As a college student studying mechanics, Hamidreza Faraji had expected after graduation to land a steady job with a fixed salary, a pension plan and the occasional bonus. He envisioned coming home at 6 p.m. to his family and vacationing at a resort on the Caspian Sea.
But Mr. Faraji, 34, has long since given up on all that. These days, he said, the only people who lead such predictable lives are government employees. Their jobs are well paid and offer security, but are hard to get in part because older employees stay on well past retirement age, limiting opportunities for the next generation.
So millions of Iranians, particularly younger ones, find themselves caught like Mr. Faraji in a vicious cycle of hidden poverty, an exhausting hustle to stay afloat, working multiple jobs and running moneymaking schemes just to keep up. The youth unemployment rate is 30 percent.
“Seeking opportunities, and trying to make the best of them,” Mr. Faraji said when asked about how he supported himself and his wife. A baby is on the way — “that just happened” — but they have no idea how they are going to pay for the additional costs with the money he makes as a small-time trader.
To many in the outside world, Iran seems to be riding high, its coffers replenished with billions of dollars it received after reaching a nuclear agreement with foreign powers. International businesses have been swarming into the country, seemingly eager to clinch deals.
The government is throwing its weight around regionally as well, lending political and military support to Shiite groups and governments in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen and extending its influence eastward into Afghanistan. In fiery speeches, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, boasts of Iran’s far-reaching impact.
The Trump administration has expressed deep concerns about Iran’s expanding power, with the secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, saying recently, “Everywhere you look if there is trouble in the region, you find Iran.”
But with a presidential election coming Friday, many middle-class Iranians see things in a different way. Disillusioned and cynical, they are frustrated by years of high unemployment, inflation that eats relentlessly into living standards and widespread corruption.
And they are frustrated with a state widely regarded as ossified and out of touch, a mixture of a quasi-socialist economy dominated by the military and clergy, and elective institutions supervised by conservative clerical bodies that have the final say on legislation and candidates for political office.
Veterans of the 1979 revolution, like Ayatollah Khamenei, are still in charge, reinforcing a rigid revolutionary ideology and doing their best to resist pressures for change. With no obvious younger generation of leaders, the country also faces a looming succession crisis.
While foreign investors often are said to be intent on doing deals, it is unclear whether they will help start an economic boom. With few exceptions, they are signing memorandums of understanding, not actual contracts.
Many are concerned that the Trump administration could penalize big international banks that choose to do business in Iran, if they are deemed to violate nonnuclear American sanctions still in force against the country.
Only big banks can provide the large-scale financing needed for the major, job-creating infrastructure projects that Iran desperately needs.
President Hassan Rouhani — who is running for re-election against, among others, Ebrahim Raisi, a favorite of hard-liners — had hoped to have made headway on these problems by now. He ran in 2013 promising to reinvigorate the economy by forging the nuclear deal, ending or easing sanctions that cut Iran off from international finance and opening the country to foreign investment and ideas.
He accomplished the nuclear pact, but the economic benefits have been meager at best. Instead, Iranians, many of them college graduates, are working longer and harder just to make ends meet.
‘Everything Has Ground to a Halt’
For Mr. Faraji, that means selling honey and saffron to supermarkets and running a cosmetics shop. To survive in a brutally competitive marketplace, he has to keep an eye out for the police while he buys smuggled products, pays bribes, intimidates delinquent bill payers and devises schemes to dupe store owners into buying his products.
He counts himself lucky, in some respects. He says he has avoided doing any smuggling himself, or resorting to other illegal activities like selling alcohol or organizing mixed weddings, where men and women dance with one another — all common in Iran’s underground economy.
Some afternoons his wife joins him at his shop. Otherwise, they would never see each other. “I go to sleep at 1 a.m. and leave the house at 6 a.m.,” Mr. Faraji said.
Most of the time, he tries not to think about why his life has become such a struggle, he said. But in his heart he knows: “Everything has ground to a halt. We’re moving back, rather than forward.”
Still, he explained, he would be voting for Mr. Rouhani, saying he would choose “the least-bad candidate to prevent an even worse situation.”
Mr. Faraji’s workday begins around 6:30, when he feeds his two caged songbirds, settles behind his desk in a run-down house and starts working the phones, pressing for unpaid bills and checking with his field representatives.
In the struggle to move the honey and saffron, Mr. Faraji has resorted to an age-old scheme, sending his team into supermarkets across the city asking for the brands he has amassed, hoping to build a market for them. The next day, he sends his employees out again, each to a different store, offering to sell the products they had asked for the day before.
But as they gathered around Mr. Faraji’s desk on a recent morning, it was clear that business was not going well.
“The supermarkets aren’t buying anything,” said Hassan Seyedi, 29, who moved from the western city of Kermanshah to Tehran, the capital, a year ago in search of work.
Across from him sat Mehdi Khanzadeh, 27. Mr. Khanzadeh was lucky, the others said, in that he worked two days a week for Iranian state television, a position he had secured through a family contact.
“I studied architecture, but there are no jobs,” he said, adding that like many Iranians in their 20s and 30s, he still lives with his parents. He said he often fell short of the $750 a month he needed to scrape by, but “at least I have some steady income.”
The young men laid out how they saw the facts. Business was bad, and if the shopkeepers ordered anything, it was in small quantities and they refused to pay in advance.
“Give them a reasonable bribe, if necessary, so that they take our honey,” Mr. Faraji advised. “We’ll worry about payment later.”
Also in the room was a bulky man with a mustache: Mr. Faraji’s debt collector. There is rarely a need to rough people up, the man said, because “usually they pay when I come over.”
Iran’s Ministry of Labor counts every Iranian who works at least one hour a week as employed. There is no welfare for the long-term unemployed, but laid-off workers get some unemployment insurance. By the official figures, which economists say understate the problem, eight million Iranians are jobless, and only half of Iran’s educated women ever find a job.
At the same time, the government, seeking to provide some sort of safety net in hard economic times, is running fat: It employs around 8.5 million people, out of a national population of just 80 million. But those highly sought-after jobs are difficult for younger Iranians to even hope for.
Newsletter Sign Up
Thank you for subscribing.
An error has occurred. Please try again later.
You are already subscribed to this email.
View all New York Times newsletters.
For Mr. Faraji, the day was barely half-done when at 11 a.m. he shared a taxi to the shopping center where he had recently rented a tiny space to sell perfumes and cosmetics. Most of his merchandise is smuggled into the country, often by powerful groups related to security organizations, he said. While technically illegal, it is a common practice, the only way to avoid a hefty official import tax.
In the mostly empty mall, the only sound was the odd crackle of an escalator.
Whether it’s honey or perfumes, Mr. Faraji concluded, prices are too high and no one is buying. Like many Iranians, he blamed politicians and an ideology that has left roughly 80 percent of the economy under state ownership.
“Our leaders need money, so they raise the prices,” he said. “They need to spend money in Syria, in Yemen and Iraq to defend their ideology. We are paying.”
The ideology, a mix of anti-Western socialism and a rigid interpretation of Islam, is widely regarded as outdated. Mr. Faraji is not alone in calling it a drag on the economy or in throwing up his hands in frustration.
“Stop saying, ‘Death to America,’ make amends with the world and foreign investors and jobs will come,” he said. “But let’s be realistic: That will not happen.”
Change, in Fits and Starts
Not everyone is so jaded. Many in Iran’s moderate and reformist faction are guardedly optimistic that the country is changing, albeit in fits and starts, and always subject to reversals by hard-liners.
One of those optimists, Mahmoud Sadeghi, a former cleric and son of a famous ayatollah, now wears a suit as a member of Parliament and takes to Twitter as he probes corruption among the ruling elite.
In the parliamentary elections of 2015, reformists and moderates gained a small majority, which they have used to attack problems like corruption that discourage economic initiatives.
Mr. Sadeghi and other reformists note that, largely under the radar, Iran has changed a great deal over the years, in some ways resembling many Western societies. After roughly 20 years of the internet, satellite television and affordable foreign travel, Iranians have grown more sophisticated, educated and moderate, and less pious.
Iran’s aging leaders have been forced to give ground, tolerating changes they can no longer prevent. Gone are the days when police officers would raid rooftops to remove illegal satellite dishes. Most Iranians can now watch more than 150 foreign-based Persian language channels, while state television, heavily salted with lectures by conservative clerics, is increasingly ignored.
“We are successful in bringing change, as otherwise I would not be sitting in Parliament,” Mr. Sadeghi said, referring to his status as a corruption fighter.
In November, Mr. Sadeghi gave a speech in Parliament accusing the head of the judiciary, Sadegh Amoli-Larijani, of maintaining a secret bank account to collect diverted public funds. After the speech, representatives of the judiciary tried to arrest him, but were stopped when dozens of people gathered in front of his house to protect him.
Nevertheless, change for Mr. Sadeghi and many within Iran’s establishment means altering existing law, not overhauling Iran’s political system and establishment.
And that change is halting. For instance, in 2016, Parliament passed a measure that would have made women eligible for top political positions, only to have it blocked by the 12-member Guardian Council — now led by a 90-year-old hard-liner, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati — which reviews all new laws to ensure they are properly “Islamic.”
Parliament’s attempts to make it easier for women to obtain a divorce and more difficult for men to take a second wife were similarly rejected by the council, which also vets candidates for elections.
This, too, has consequences for the economy, as obscure laws enacted after the revolution in 1979 remain on the books, often used by ideologues or unscrupulous officials to undermine business ventures that in most other countries would be brilliant successes.
Take, for example, Sohrab Mostaghim, 28, and some of his friends, all graduates of Tehran’s best universities, who designed a treasure hunt set in the city’s most popular park. Soon, hundreds of people were happily paying the equivalent of $11 each to play the game, based on riddles and questions embedded in an app on their mobile phones.
But when they told a manager of the park what was going on, they were blindsided by his reaction.
“Instead of welcoming the extra visitors and this fun game, he pressured us, claiming our promotional video was against Islam, since at the end the brother and sister hug,” Mr. Mostaghim said. Physical contact between men and women in public is officially forbidden in Iran, but the rules are widely flouted in the larger cities.
Ultimately, the partners felt they had to shut the game down, whereupon the manager changed his tune.
“Now, he is asking us for bribes to allow us to use the park,” Mr. Mostaghim said. “We are not even sure if he will really allow us if we pay.”
The whole idea of a start-up is to embrace freedom to think and create, he said, “but we don’t have that here.”
Even established businesses that suffered during the years of sanctions are finding it difficult to recapture lost customers. For Bahram Shahriyari, 58, the prospect of lifting international sanctions after the nuclear deal was a faint light at the end of what had become a dark tunnel.
Until the sanctions were imposed, he had owned a business providing parts and components for new and used vehicles made by Peugeot-Citroën of France, one of the most prominent foreign brands in the country. At its peak just four years ago, his company had 400 employees and even exported parts to France.
“But the sanctions and mismanagement of our leaders was neck-breaking,” Mr. Shahriyari said. His principal customer, an Iranian state-owned automotive company, Iran Khodro, stopped placing orders because it was having trouble selling cars. Before long, his checks started bouncing, he said, and he told employees that he could no longer pay their wages.
Peugeot-Citroën has now re-entered the market, restarting an existing joint venture but dealing only with Iran Khodro. For Mr. Shahriyari, who lost his most valuable employees and customers and still cannot obtain financing, it is far too late.
“A contact, an ambassador for Iran, once told me, ‘You have to pay the price for the nuclear advancement of our country,’” he said. “Believe me, I did.”
We’re interested in your feedback on this page. Tell us what you think.
