Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has publicly admitted crises in electricity, water, gas, fuel, banking, the budget and pensions, and warned that these failures could spark social unrest, Tasnim reported.

Why it matters

The list covers almost every basic service the state is supposed to provide. It is an unusually complete admission from the head of the government responsible for them.

Just as revealing is how he framed it. Pezeshkian's concern is not only the hardship itself but how people might react to it. When a government's first worry about power cuts, water shortages and pension shortfalls is the protests they might cause, it shows whom the regime sees as its greatest threat: not a foreign enemy, but its own people.