“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.

Less than three months into the devastating downpours, Tehran and its arch-enemy Washington entered a fresh cycle of tensions after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) downed an American drone as it flew into the Iranian territory near the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the international passageway for over a third of the world’s seaborne oil traffic.

While the dust settled and the shadow of war faded, more trouble struck at home. The Rouhani government, backed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, approved and implemented a contentious economic plan involving tripled gas prices. Already squeezed by dwindling purchasing power in a crumbling economy hit hard by US sanctions, ordinary Iranians took to the streets to vent their rage. The government responded with zero tolerance in the form of bullets that left many dead — by some accounts 1,500 — on streets across Iran in mid-November. The crackdown included a crippling nationwide internet blackout. Thousands, among them children, are still languishing in Iran’s detention centers in connection with the protests. Nevertheless, Rouhani made no reference to the November turmoil in his end-of-year speech.