President Masoud Pezeshkian’s Cabinet appointed Abdolnasser Hemmati, a former economics minister, as the new governor of the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the official IRNA news agency reported

Iran has appointed a new central bank governor in response to the mass protests against the country’s struggling economy, which were triggered by a record decline in the value of its currency against the US dollar.

President Masoud Pezeshkian’s Cabinet appointed Abdolnasser Hemmati, a former economics minister, as the new governor of the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Hemmati succeeds Mohammad Reza Farzin, who resigned earlier this week after Iran saw one of its largest protests after the Mahsa Amini demonstrations in 2022.

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Hemmati’s agenda will include a focus on controlling inflation and strengthening the currency, as well as addressing the mismanagement of banks, according to Fatemeh Mohajerani, the government’s spokeswoman, who wrote on X.

Why is Iran protesting?

Experts say a 40 per cent inflation rate led to public discontent. The US dollar traded at 1.38 million rials on Wednesday, compared with 430,000 rials when Farzin took office in 2022. Many traders and shopkeepers closed their businesses on Sunday and took to the streets of Tehran and other cities to protest.

A combination of the currency’s rapid depreciation and inflationary pressure has pushed up the prices of food and other daily necessities, adding to strain on household budgets already under pressure due to Western sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program.

While the demonstrations have been largely quelled in the Iranian capital of Tehran by the government, they have spread across the country’s rural areas. The fatalities, two on Wednesday and five on Thursday, occurred in four cities, largely home to Iran’s Lur ethnic group.

US-Iran spar over protests

Meanwhile, US President
Donald Trump has issued a stern warning, saying the US would come to the rescue if peaceful protesters are killed.

“We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social account.

Responding to Trump’s warning over the ongoing protests in Iran, senior Iranian officials on Friday cautioned that any US interference would trigger instability across the region, as tensions between Washington and Tehran escalated further.

Ali Larijani, former parliament speaker and secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, alleged on X that the US and Israel were stoking the protests, though he offered no evidence.

He warned that US intervention would lead to “chaos in the entire region” and harm American interests, adding that the US public should be aware of the risks to its soldiers deployed across West Asia.

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