Guardian Council Member Challenges Iran’s Oil-as-Public-Good Narrative

A member of Iran’s Guardian Council has openly challenged one of the Islamic Republic’s foundational economic claims: that oil belongs to the people. The statement reveals fractures within the regime’s own power structure over how to manage resources amid cascading economic pressures.

Morteza Mirsaeidi, speaking in a recent television interview, rejected the idea that oil is a public asset to be consumed freely. Instead, he reframed it as “anfal” – a Quranic term for divinely sanctioned wealth – belonging ultimately to God and the Prophet, not the Iranian population. His critique targeted officials who have long justified subsidized fuel prices by invoking public ownership of petroleum reserves.^[1][2]

Mirsaeidi’s objection cuts deeper than theological semantics. He highlighted the fiscal hemorrhage created by Iran’s fuel subsidy regime: a liter of gasoline costs approximately 25,000 rials to produce but sells for a fraction of that price, with the state absorbing the difference from general revenues.^[1] In the United States, by contrast, gasoline costs roughly one dollar per liter at market rates. The gap between production cost and retail price has become unsustainable as Iran’s budget tightens under sanctions and economic contraction.

The Guardian Council member also traced Iran’s current economic dysfunction to decisions made decades earlier. He blamed the presidency of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in the 1990s for initiating what he called “economic deviations” – massive capital injections for reconstruction that generated inflation rather than productive capacity or corresponding human resources.^[3] These structural problems, he argued, have persisted and deepened across successive administrations.

Mirsaeidi’s willingness to air such critiques publicly signals something significant about the post-Raisi political landscape. The Guardian Council, typically a bastion of institutional conservatism, is not monolithic. Its members represent competing factions – principalists, pragmatists, and reformists – who increasingly diverge on how to address Iran’s economic crisis. That a council member would publicly challenge the rhetorical foundation of fuel subsidies suggests the regime recognizes the policy is untenable but remains divided over how to restructure it without triggering domestic unrest.

The subsidy question has haunted Iranian policymakers for two decades. Previous attempts at reform – most notably under former president Hassan Rouhani – triggered inflation spikes and public backlash. Any new government faces the same dilemma: eliminating subsidies would ease fiscal pressure and reduce smuggling but would immediately raise living costs for ordinary Iranians already struggling with a collapsing rial and housing unaffordability. Maintaining them drains resources needed for infrastructure, healthcare, and military modernization.

Mirsaeidi’s reframing of oil as a divine trust rather than public property hints at a potential ideological exit ramp: if oil belongs to God and the state as His representative, not to citizens, then the state has greater latitude to restructure how that resource is managed. This theological repositioning could precede policy shifts that would be politically toxic if framed as “taking away people’s oil.”

What this tells us about the regime’s stability calculus: the Guardian Council is beginning to acknowledge openly that Iran’s economic model is broken. The question now is whether the regime can reform subsidies, restructure state enterprises, or attract foreign investment – all of which require either ideological flexibility or the kind of coercive capacity the state may lack if economic pain triggers sustained protest.