Words

The former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was defeated in elections two years ago by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and since has found his voice increasingly muffled and his advice to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, largely ignored, according to political analysts with close relations to Mr. Rafsanjani.
Political analysts said that Mr. Rafsanjani’s influence is as low as it has ever been, and that it was not clear if the new post would lift his status, or if his diminished authority would drag down the Assembly, a group of 88 clerics. In the many interconnected bodies that form the Iranian government, it is relatively small and has wielded little power, though its mandate is to monitor the supreme leader’s performance and select his replacement when he dies.
Mr. Rafsanjani, who was an associate of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and like him a father of the revolution, was president from 1989 to 1997. An experienced insider seen as interested in lessening Iran’s international isolation, he won the chairmanship of the Assembly of Experts with 41 votes of the 76 cast. His ultraconservative opponent, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, received 31 votes.
Theoretically, Mr. Rafsanjani should be a powerful force. In addition to leading the Assembly, he will retain his post in charge of another arm of the government, the Expediency Council. That arm negotiates differences between the appointed hard-line decision makers on the Guardian Council, and the elected Parliament.
But Ayatollah Khamenei has the final say on all matters of state. He has shown no interest in restoring Mr. Rafsanjani’s influence and has long viewed him as a challenge to his own authority, many political analysts said.
Aside from the supreme leader’s overwhelming authority, power in Iran is diffuse, split among constituencies from the conservatives and clerics to the reformists and hard-liners. These days, it is held primarily by the most radical hard-liners aligned with the president and Ayatollah Khamenei. The vote in the Assembly is unlikely to shift that reality, political analysts said.
“I don’t think anything will change at the Assembly,” said Abbas Abdi, a political analyst in Tehran. “It does not have anything to do with the political trends.”
The victory for Mr. Rafsanjani came at a time of increased pressure from the ultraconservative government of President Ahmadinejad. This week, the government stripped Mr. Rafsanjani’s autobiography from store shelves because it contained a passage claiming that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini supported plans to drop the “Death to America” slogan, which remains popular today. That book passage, and Mr. Rafsanjani, also were derided in the Kayhan newspaper, the voice of the most radical forces in Iran.
But Mr. Rafsanjani has not given up. Having seen his standing rise and fall, he has suggested he might be pressing, once again, for political rehabilitation. Just before the vote, Mr. Rafsanjani hinted that he might press the Assembly to have a more robust profile than in the past three decades, when it had not issued even a single public report.
“If the Experts Assembly wants to play a more active role in the country’s affairs, it has the religious and legal justification to do that,” IRNA quoted Mr. Rafsanjani as saying. The news agency said he added, “Perhaps the assembly will do so in its upcoming term.”