Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Reddit Email Print
Iranian regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei addressed his followers on March 21, 2025, in Tehran, Iran’s capital
Three-minute read
On March 21, 2025, Ali Khamenei delivered his annual Nowruz speech in northern Tehran, addressing a tightly vetted and demoralized group of regime loyalists. Under the shadow of domestic unrest, regional failures, and mounting international pressure, Khamenei resorted to his usual cocktail of religious sanctimony, economic doublespeak, and geopolitical deflection. While posturing as a moral leader, he painted a distorted picture of the country’s situation, presenting himself as both above the political fray and the guiding hand of the nation. A closer fact-check of his claims, however, reveals a desperate bid to salvage the clerical dictatorship’s eroding legitimacy at home and abroad.
A Call to Enrich Regime Conglomerates
Khamenei designated the Persian year 1404 (March 2025–March 2026) as the year of “investment for production,” urging Iranians to channel their money into domestic ventures. “When we say investment, we don’t mean foreign investment,” he emphasized. “We mean domestic investment — people should not spend their liquidity on gold, foreign currency, or land.”
What he failed to mention is that productive sectors in Iran are dominated by entities under his direct control — including the IRGC, the Astan Quds Razavi, and massive holding companies like Setad (EIKO) and Bonyads. These institutions have a long record of embezzlement and economic mismanagement. Worse, previous calls for public investment — such as his 2020 promotion of stock market participation — ended in catastrophe when markets crashed, wiping out the savings of ordinary citizens while regime insiders profited.
Khamenei further stressed that “small or large-scale investments are all useful and necessary”, but again ignored that knowledge-based companies — the supposed target of this call — are largely controlled by military and clerical conglomerates. These same entities are now facing protests across the country by defrauded investors.
Khamenei’s Survival at Stake in #Iran—Refuses Talks, Doubles Down on Hostilityhttps://t.co/2QEJdEgIXI
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) March 13, 2025
A historical example exposes this strategy further: in 1996, during a trip to Khuzestan, Khamenei launched the so-called “550,000-hectare project,” confiscating vast tracts of land in Khuzestan and Ilam. Officially pitched as a development project for agricultural prosperity, the land was handed over to regime-linked entities, diverting public water from the Karun River to these operations and accelerating the environmental collapse of the region. Though the project was funded by state budgets, its profits were pocketed by regime elites, while locals received nothing but drought and displacement. In 2014, the Rouhani government poured $1.5 billion from the National Development Fund into the project. By 2018, under Es’haq Jahangiri, the cost of the second phase had ballooned to 20 trillion tomans.
Denying Economic Power, While Pulling the Strings
In his speech, Khamenei disingenuously claimed: “The Leader does not interfere in economic planning, nor is he allowed to.” However, the regime’s Article 110 of the Constitution explicitly grants him authority to set macroeconomic policy and oversee its implementation. Moreover, he personally established the Economic Coordination Council of the Heads of the Three Branches in 2018, whose decisions — including the 2019 gasoline price hike — triggered massive nationwide protests and hundreds of deaths.
As former President Hassan Rouhani later revealed, Khamenei not only backed the price hike but insisted on its approval, even when the cabinet opposed it. The claim of non-involvement in economic decision-making is both misleading and demonstrably false.
By declaring that the “Leader’s role is not economic planning,” he effectively threw Pezeshkian under the bus — isolating himself from accountability while maintaining overarching control through policy directives and institutional leverage.
This tactic mirrors his past behavior — shielding himself from the fallout of regime decisions while empowering loyalists to execute his agenda.
Khamenei’s Speech Reveals His Deepest Fear: The #Iranian Peoplehttps://t.co/pcr6apDfMu
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) February 18, 2025
Khamenei’s Response to Trump
Though he did not name him directly, Khamenei responded to a letter from U.S. President Donald Trump, whose terms are claimed to have been leaked by a regional analyst on March 21, including: “dismantle the nuclear program,” “stop uranium enrichment,” “cease weapons shipments to the Houthis,” and “end financial support to Hezbollah.”
Khamenei dismissed these conditions as “futile,” stating: “Anyone who threatens the Iranian nation will be slapped hard.” This line — a veiled reference to retaliation through nuclear escalation or regional militias — is widely interpreted as Tehran’s rejection of Trump’s offer of negotiations in exchange for sanctions relief.
Khamenei also tried to deny the very existence of Tehran’s regional proxies, asserting that: “Resistance movements in Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen act based on internal motivations and faith — Iran has no need for proxies.” This claim flies in the face of decades of evidence documenting the clerical dictatorship’s deep involvement with Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces.
A Regime on the Defensive
While Khamenei praised “unprecedented voter turnout” and the “epic funeral of Martyr Raisi,” video evidence and eyewitness accounts suggest otherwise. Reports showed empty polling stations during the various 2024 sham elections and widespread public apathy. Funerals were orchestrated with heavy state involvement, and dissenters were threatened or arrested.
His depiction of national unity stands in stark contrast to a year marked by record-high executions, mass protests, and escalating strikes. The clerical dictatorship’s attempt to mask its repression with religious and revolutionary slogans grows more hollow by the year.
Far from projecting strength, Khamenei’s Nowruz speech betrayed a regime on the defensive—facing international isolation, economic meltdown, factional infighting, and growing defiance from a people who, after 45 years of clerical misrule, have grown immune to the regime’s lies. Beneath the grandiose rhetoric, the message was clear: the regime’s Supreme Leader is scrambling to hold the line. But the cracks in the foundation are growing.