182.1K
Downloads
412
Episodes
Dive deeper into the week’s biggest stories from the Middle East and around the world with The National’s foreign desk. Nuances are often missed in day-to-day headlines. We go Beyond the Headlines by bringing together the voices of experts and those living the news to provide a clearer picture of the region’s shifting political and social landscape.
Episodes
Wednesday Aug 11, 2021
Wednesday Aug 11, 2021
On August 5th, Iran inaugurated a new president putting an end to the 8-year presidency of reformist Hassan Rouhani and ushered in a new, hard-line government.
The new president, Ebrahim Raisi is said to be handpicked by the supreme leader Ali Khamenei, the man who controls Iran's religious ideology and political ideology. Mr Raisi is a hard-line cleric who won his election amid accusations of corruption and historically low voter turnout.
The new president had vowed in his campaign to continue the nuclear talks in Vienna, in an effort to get US sanctions removed and help relieve some of Iran’s economic pain. He also tempered his usually hard-line rhetoric around Iran’s domestic policy. But, now, a week since President Raisi was inaugurated, Iranians are already seeing a change.
This week on Beyond the Headlines, host Leila Gharagozlou talks to an expert on Iran’s political space and an Iranian reporter about the future of one of the world’s most closed off countries, Iran.