Iran's Khamenei calls gender equality a 'Zionist conspiracy'

Spain and Iran: Mortality and Age Structure

Spain buries more people than Iran despite having half the inhabitants. In 2020, Spain registered 493,776 deaths, with a mortality rate of 10.40‰. Iran, with nearly double the population, recorded 467,840 and a rate of 5.57‰. This paradox persists in any comparison between the two countries and allows for two interpretations: the health-related and the demographic one. The latter, far less dramatic, is the one that withstands scrutiny.

Why does Spain record more deaths than Iran with half the population?

As noted in the debate, the answer relates to age rather than hospital quality: 20% of Spain's 47 million citizens are over 65 years old, compared to 6% among Iran's 84 million. In 2021, Iran recorded 546,122 deaths and Spain 450,744, according to the same data.

The corollary of the data is less pleasant. We have gone a generation without generational replacement, and the age structure narrows at the bottom. It is important not to confuse the symptom with the cause: the country does not die more because it is worse, but because it is older.

What did Khamenei say about gender equality?

Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, described gender equality as a "Zionist conspiracy" and reaffirmed women's role as "mother, vvife, and housewife," during a speech coinciding with the anniversary of the birth of Prophet Muhammad's daughter. He also accused the West of "turning women into merchandise and objects of gratification."

The message is not new, but it arrives at a time of maximum public exposure and functions as an inverted mirror: there, what is presented here as an achievement is framed as a threat. Each country projects its own demographic antiestéticar onto the other.

Iranian birth rates that contradict the narrative

Iran has a fertility rate of 1.70 children per woman (2023), below the replacement threshold and not far from Spain's. The discourse that sells it as a pro-natalist paradise clashes with this figure. On the financial front, Iranian public debt reached €248.525 billion in 2019, after growing by €71.169 billion in a single year: even theocracy cannot escape the arithmetic of indebtedness.

Some argue that the country best resisting external pressure is the one maintaining acceptable birth rates; the more prudent calculation responds that pressure and fertility are two distinct variables and mixing them is cheating.

From Carrero Blanco to the Shah: The bomb, Kissinger, and succession

Part of the analysis uses recent history to explain the present: Admiral Carrero Blanco told Henry Kissinger about the Islero Project—the plan to give Spain an atomic bomb—the day before he died in a bombing attack. Hence arises the thesis that King Juan Carlos I was the functional equivalent of the Shah of Persia: a figure who concentrates visible power so he can be removed without open conflict.


The comparison has narrative appeal and historical gaps, but captures a shared intuition: countries are managed as pieces, not as subjects.

Immigration and replacement: What supports one side

One school of thought argues that Spain is suffering a demographic attack and that immigration acts as a substitute for lost births; another responds that speaking of replacement is a baseless metaphor and that the only real urgency is the age pyramid. One participant cites the calculation that Afghanistan multiplies annual births by 5.5 times and Pakistan by 20.

The truth is that the demographic diagnosis does not need adjectives to be serious.

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With these differentials, the conclusion would seem obvious: whoever has children and ages more slowly wins. Which of the two things can be decided from an office, and which only from a bedroom, remains unanswered.