Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was responsible for bringing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency in 2005 and paid a hefty price for keeping him in that job in 2009. These days, however, the Supreme Leader has chosen to make the president a scapegoat for Iran’s deepening political and economic crisis.

While Khamenei is the ultimate decision-maker in the Islamic Republic, he hopes to avoid accountability for the regime’s failed policies. In the wake of the protests that followed the disputed 2009 vote, the Supreme Leader stood firmly behind Ahmadinejad, primarily to ensure the marginalization of reformists and long-standing icons such as former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Now that the power and influence of the first generation of revolutionary leaders has waned, Khamenei’s sole use for Ahmadinejad is to pin the entirety of social and economic woes on him.

The judiciary — headed by a rival of the president, Sadegh Larijani — has accused the Ahmadinejad administration of the most severe corruption since the 1979 revolution. The legislature — headed by Larijani’s brother Ali, another rival of the president — also blames Ahmadinejad for economic mismanagement, which has resulted in rising inflation and unemployment and an unprecedented collapse of the Iranian currency, the rial.

Ahmadinejad now finds himself lambasted on all sides. During a news conference Tuesday, Oct. 2, he counterattacked not only the parliament but the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), state-run media and the judiciary for mounting a psychological offensive aiming to sabotage his efforts to solve the economic crisis. All these entities are under the direct supervision of Khamenei.