led by Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini. Since 1989, Ali Khamenei has ruled Iran as Supreme Leader, making him the second-longest serving head of state in the Middle East (after Oman's Sultan Qaboos), as well as the second-longest serving Iranian leader of the last century, after Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, who was re-elected in 2017, had promised many changes such as a richer economy and open foreign policy but he has little power to change compared to Khamenei in the Iranian government. In 2006, following international concerns regarding the government's nuclear program, a comprehensive, international sanctions regime was imposed on Iran. In 2015, Iran negotiated a deal with the great powers of the world in exchange for economic relief. Many Iranians hoped relief from sanctions would result in economic prosperity; however, benefits have not reached the average Iranian. Instead, the benefit from sanctions relief mostly went to state firms and Setad controlled by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, estimated by Reuters at $95 billion in 2013. In 2017, according to the Iranian Chamber of Commerce, 33% of Iranians lived below the poverty line, and the gap between the rich and poor has deepened. CNN's Hamid Panah argued that these distributional developments in the economy helped stoke the protests. Recent economic hardships have appeared to incite economic protests and shine light on government corruption. In order to deflect criticism about the economy, Rouhani had been complaining for several weeks about government money going to religious institutions, which are seen as the power base of the hardliners; according to international media reports, analysts believe that hardliners started the protests as a means to embarrass Rouhani. For many Iranians, development had been slow despite the president's promise to restore the economy. Protesters registered their opposition to cuts to fuel and cash subsidies, contained in the 2018 budget proposal unveiled in mid-December, which caused widespread anger, with the hashtag #pashimanam ("we regret" [i.e., we regret our vote for Rouhani]) going viral across the country. The generous government funding of the Revolutionary Guards remained unaffected, and there were large increases for religious foundations, which are not required to declare how they spend their funds, and are "tied closely to powerful clerics and often serve as machines for patronage and propaganda to build support for their authority." Furthermore, protesters sought an explanation as to why the government had spent a lot of money