Rouhani defends annual performance from floods to coronavirus
The Iranian president's end-of-year speech was full of boastful optimism, but the nation remembers a year that began with killer downpours and is ending with a deadly epidemic.
“A good year ahead can be seen in a good spring,” goes a popular Persian proverb. The idea might ring true enough for Iranians looking back at the Persian year 1398, which comes to a close March 20.
“Despite the problems that our enemy was determined to cause it, our nation managed to end the year in triumph,” President Hassan Rouhani said in a televised speech among mask-wearing cabinet members in Tehran March 18. But to many Iranians, the year was a collage of fast-paced developments opening with country-wide floods that killed scores and marred the last new year holidays. “All homes of the flood-stricken were either renovated or rebuilt,” Rouhani said of the government response to the disaster, though critics have called it slow and poor.
