The queues began before dawn and outlasted it. Since Wednesday, gas stations across parts of Tehran have been running dry, with drivers reporting waits of an hour or more for pumps that sputter out mid-tank — the sharpest fuel disruption the capital has shown since the war economy tightened around it. [1] The pattern is patchy rather than total, some stations pumping while others sit shuttered, which points to strained supply and allocation rather than a dry country: the fuel exists somewhere. It is just not reaching every pump that needs it.

The timing is not subtle. The government has moved closer to raising subsidized gasoline prices days before a new American sanctions package lands, and state media have begun warning of a social explosion if it proceeds — the vocabulary of a government preparing its own citizens for a bill. [4] Iran sits atop some of the largest hydrocarbon reserves on earth; its capital cannot keep pumps wet. That sentence contains the entire sanctions argument, and both sides of it know.

Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last shah and the opposition's most recognizable name, issued a statement Saturday that read the moment as verdict rather than mishap. The attempt to raise prices, he wrote, exposes "the incompetence and structural disarray of Iran's energy market," charging that the regime spends the country's resources on foreign adventures and domestic repression while its inner circles plunder the national wealth and its incompetence breaks the backs of households. Imposing the increase on an impoverished public, he concluded, is "an unforgivable mistake and a great betrayal." [2] Diaspora channels carried the message into every queue video posted from Tehran; hardliner accounts answered that concessions under blockade are surrender by another name.

What gives the queues their charge is memory. The last time a government here moved against subsidized gasoline, in November 2019, the price announcement set off protests within hours and security forces answered with lethal force, scarring the political class on all sides. Every official insisting this hike is different is really insisting 2019 will not repeat. Nobody outside the cabinet can promise that.

The economics underneath are simpler and worse than politics. Blockaded ports, collapsing crude offers to China, and a currency in free fall have stripped the state of the margin that once made cheap gasoline bearable. A subsidy is only affordable while oil revenue flows; the blockade's whole design is to stop the flow and let the subsidy strangle the budget instead. Tehran is now living inside that mechanism, and the pumps are where citizens meet it. [3] The sanctions package arrives within days. The queues started before it did.

For the government, the choice is between rationing by queue and rationing by price — chaos now or explosion later, in the formulation its own media prefer. For the drivers waiting in them, the argument lands differently. They are not choosing anything. They are just first in line for a crisis someone else designed.

-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem