The End of the Leadership for the Expert on Leadership

The chairmanship of Hashemi Rafsanjani in the Assembly of Experts, the body responsible for appointing the leader of the Islamic republic, finally came to its end on the day when by its end it was still not clear how many votes did the new chairman Mohammad-Reza Mahdavi Kani get: sixty three or sixty four.

After presenting a rather lengthy speech yesterday in what subsequently came to be his last, Hashemi Rafsanjani, the chairman of the Assembly of Experts on Leadership, asked Mahdavi Kani whether he was ready to run as the new chair.

With Kani’s positive response, Hashemi did not run as a candidate for the post, as did nobody else. And so the secretary general of the Association of Combatant Clerics (Jame’e Rohaniyate Mobarez) who had once declared that “those who tried to oust Hashemi Rafsanjani did not wield any power,” himself replaced Rafsanjani in the end. The appointment of the new chairman was the only change in the governing board. The board of directors remains the same as Mohammad Yazdi and Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi got re-elected as vice chairmen while Ahmad Khatami and Ghorbanali Dori Najafabadi also remaining as secretaries at the board. Ebrahim Raeesi and Sadegh Amoli Larijani were also re-appointed as aides to the board.

According to the constitution of the Islamic republic of Iran, the Assembly of Experts on Leadership is in charge of appointing and dismissing the country’s supreme leader. After the death of Ali Meshkini who had held the chair since the Assembly’s inception, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was appointed as the new chairman. But to get there, he had run and defeated Mohammad Yazdi and Ahmad Jannati.

This time as major differences between Hashemi Rafsanjani and ayatollah Khamenei deepened since the 2009 presidential elections, many forces including Ahmadinejad’s supporters, media outlets close to him, and many clerics and officials close to the leader coalesced to oust Hashemi from this position.  During recent months many of Hashemi’s opponents and their affiliated media demanded his resignation from the Assembly, accusing him of “supporting the sedition,” of “opposing the leader”, of engaging in “family corruption” etc. While these groups and individuals initially came out in support of several candidates including Mahdavi Kani, Mohammad Yazdi, and Mesbah Yazdi, they narrow down their candidate more recently to Kani and worked to convince him to run for the chairmanship of the body. Even Hashemi seems to have wavered initially, but subsequently gave in and passed the baton to a relatively moderate cleric who has been in the Assembly since its inception. Rafsanjani continues to be the head of another powerful clerical body, the State Expediency Council which arbitrates in the differences between the legislature and executive branches of government in Iran, although it has at times got involved in other issues as well.