The former president retains the chairmanship of the more important Expediency Council, a policy-making body, but the ouster from the speakership is a major political blow. That signals not only the strength of the hardliners since suppressing the post-election protest movement, but also their willingness to use that power against an icon of the revolution who has never been a hardliner.
For Rafsanjani, it appears to spell the death-knell for his philosophy of non-ideological 
compromise to bridge the gaps between the various wings of the revolution.
In recent weeks, hardliners in the Assembly of Experts had been pushing for the candidacy of Ayatollah Mohammad-Reza Mahdavi-Kani, a former prime minister who is conservative but has never been viewed as a hardliner.
When the assembly met Tuesday, Rafsanjani, 77, took the chair and made a statement, saying, “I declare that if Ayatollah Mahdavi-Kani is ready to take up this post, I definitely will not stand for election so that this holy institution will not suffer from division.” He saw the handwriting on the wall.
Mahdavi-Kani, who is 80 years old and wheelchair-bound, was not in attendance. But his supporters announced his candidacy. No one else was nominated. Mahdavi-Kani won 63 votes with 18 members abstaining—presumably the small band of reformers—and five others, including Mahdavi-Kani, absent.
The Assembly of Experts is comprised of 86 clergymen who are elected by the public to eight-year terms. Its sole duty is to fill the post of Supreme Leader when it falls vacant. Its only official act in the 32 years since the revolution has been to choose Ali Khamenehi to succeed Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. By all accounts, Rafsanjani was the chief proponent within the Assembly for the election of Ali Khamenehi as Supreme Leader.
For decades Rafsanjani was the first deputy speaker of the Assembly. He only became speaker in 2007 upon the death of the long-time speaker, Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Meshkini. But Rafsanjani effectively ran the body as first deputy speaker.
Many thought that he would now drop back to first deputy speaker again and continue to run the body behind the aged Mahdavi-Kani. But if he intended that, he failed. The Assembly elected Mohammad Yazdi as first deputy speaker and Mahmud Hashemi-Shahrudi as second deputy speaker. Both men are former chairmen of the Judiciary. Yazdi is seen as a hardliner and Shahrudi as a moderate, so their elections suggested some effort at balance within the body.
The Assembly normally meets for two or three days every six months to hear some speeches. It elects its officers for two-year terms.
Rafsanjani has widely been viewed in Iran as an opportunist whose ideology shifted with the winds. But essentially he has been a moderate who drifted slightly to the right when that was expedient and slightly to the left when that was expedient.
After the June 2009 elections, he balked at the harsh repression of the protesters. He tried to occupy a center position and to bring the opposing sides together. But Khamenehi, who has normally listened to Rafsanjani’s political advice, chose the hardline route and apparently severed his links with Rafsanjani. The weekly lunches the two men used to have reportedly ended more than a year ago.
Deputy Mahmud Ahmadi-Biqash, a hardline member of the Majlis, said Rafsanjani paid the price for refusing to condemn the leaders of the Green opposition, Mir-Hossain Musavi and Mehdi Karrubi, for challenging the ruling system. “Today, the members of the Assembly of Experts showed they are pioneers in confronting the enemies of the revolution and the seditionists,” he said, lumping Rafsanjani with Musavi and Karrubi, who are dismissed by the regime as “seditionists.”
Rafsanjani responded to the post-election protests with calls for more political freedoms and the release of political prisoners. He refused to criticize Musavi and Karrubi.
Only recently, as he realized that his speakership was in danger, did he exhibit his classic shift to the expedient. He labeled Musavi and Karrubi as “leaders of sedition” and complained that they “best served America and the Zionist regime.” He said, “In the current situation, I consider that our Constitution is sufficient.… Some people are dissatisfied. I advise them to come back [to support of the government] because we have no present alternative.”
But it was too little too late. Many analysts suspected that Rafsanjani would have won re-election Tuesday if it had not been for the renewed street protests February 14. That made the hardliners even more intolerant and strident, and appeared to seal Rafsanjani’s fate.
In the West, many commentators saw the hand of President Ahmadi-nejad in Rafsanjani’s defeat. But Ahmadi-nejad plays no role in the Assembly of Experts. While the president was likely gleeful at Rafsanjani’s fall, he was not a factor in the Assembly decision.
It is not just Rafsanjani under attack. His children have become targets as well. His daughter, Faezeh, has been arrested a few times, most recently at the February 14 protest. One son, Mehdi, has been charged with anti-government crimes for an alleged role in organizing the 2009 protests. He has fled to London. Another son, Mohsen, just resigned as head of the Tehran Metro. He has not been targeted by hardliners for a political role, but rather by Ahmadi-nejad, apparently for the crime of kinship.
Mahdavi-Kani was interior minister in 1980 and then became prime minister for two months after the assassination of the then president and prime minister. His main role over the years has been as the chairman of the conservative Association of Militant Clerics. Apart from his membership in the Assembly of Experts, he has not held a public post for decades.
Rafsanjani was close to Khomeini and has been a key figure since the first days of the revolution. He served on the secretive Revolutionary Council that ran the regime immediately after the revolution, then became speaker of the Majlis after the Constitutional government was created. He was the key person in the arms-for-hostages deal with the United States in the mid-1980s. Khomeini made him commander-in-chief of the military when the war was going badly, and it was Rafsanjani who convinced Khomeini to accept a ceasefire in 1988. Rafsanjani served as president from 1989 to 1997.
Resalat daily said in an editorial predicting the Assembly would dump Rafsanjani: “Today his reputation does not rest on political moderation, but is based on a shop window full of items that look and smell like support for a movement accused of creating sedition.”
Farideh Farhi, an Iran specialist at the University of Hawaii, said, “The bottom line is the intent to sideline a centrist and relatively powerful cleric and his supporters and, in the process, narrow the already narrow sphere of political competition even further.”
