The Council of Guardians is expected to try to ensure this by, once again, banning reformist candidates.
In last February's municipal elections the Council of Guardians blocked without explanation thousands of people, mostly reformists, from running.
Not a chance, said the Council of Guardians, protectors of the constitution: he did not have enough political experience.
Once the Council of Guardians announced the mass disqualification, deputies gamely prepared three bills designed to curb its powers.
ECONOMIST: How to fight a conservative establishment that always wins
Although beaten in the elections, the hard-liners still wield power through key institutions such as the Council of Guardians, which must approve all legislation.
Now, local committees appointed by the Council of Guardians are to be the sole keepers of the ballot boxes, both before and after the voting.
On numerous occasions, they have unveiled interesting legislation only for the Council of Guardians, a hard-line monitoring body, or even Mr Khamenei, to spike it.
ECONOMIST: Muhammad Khatami's new cabinet proves disappointing
Iran's Council of Guardians , which checks all electoral candidates, disqualified many of the prominent reformers who had wanted to stand in next month's parliamentary election.
Six of the 12 men on the Council of Guardians are clerics, and their hand in the political process has, particularly this week, been demonstrably heavy.
All hopefuls will be screened by the powerful Council of Guardians, which rules on their elegibilty to stand on the basis of their conformity with Islamic values.
But this argument overlooks the fact that all the candidates for the Qom-based Assembly of Experts must be clerics, and moreover clerics approved by the Council of Guardians.
The electoral campaign had built up slowly, with the Council of Guardians eliminating all but the four candidates, who were widely regarded as weak challengers to Mr Ahmadinejad.
The most important of the bills went before another body, the Expediency Council, whose job is to mediate impartially in disputes between parliament and the Council of Guardians.
ECONOMIST: How to fight a conservative establishment that always wins
One of the first items on the review list will be the role of the Council of Guardians, the body of conservative clerics and jurists that supervises elections and screens candidates.
Blatant jiggery-pokery by his conservative backers in the Council of Guardians, a body charged with supervising the election, resulted in the announcement on May 20th that he had somehow finished in 20th place.
In early May the Council of Guardians, a body of clerics charged with ensuring the Islamist and revolutionary credentials of public officials, disqualified hundreds of candidates at a stroke, including every female applicant.
The Council of Guardians, a conservative body of six clerics and six jurists, can veto laws it deems un-Islamic or unconstitutional and in the past it has stretched these definitions in the interest of the conservatives.
The seven unknowns who were returned from the province of Golestan in by-elections held on November 30th bear no relation to the deputies who would have been elected, had the Council of Guardians, a conservative monitoring body, not prevented well over one-third of the field from standing.
ECONOMIST: How to fight a conservative establishment that always wins
Perhaps the saddest aspect of Mr Khatami's dilemma is that he is being solicited not because he has new ideas or new methods of advancing old ones, but because he is an elder statesman whom the Council of Guardians, a vetting body, would not dare bar from running.
The problem was not so much the stuffing of ballot boxes or a rigged count as the disqualification of hundreds of reformist candidates under a system of double vetting by the interior ministry and the Council of Guardians, an unelected body empowered to inspect the religious credentials of those wishing to stand.
After the revolution, he was the heir apparent to Khomeini, and played a key role in writing Iran's constitution as the first chair of the powerful Guardians Council.
However, getting rid of Mr Rafsanjani could prove almost as difficult as reducing the overall influence of the Guardians and the Expediency Council.
Sunday's announcement by the Guardians Council ensures that the 2008 elections will similarly maintain the power of the radicals.
Charity Bee Guardians, which handed the accolade to the council, said the city should be "so proud" of its new title.
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