President Muhammad Khatami and his followers run the government and are a majority in parliament.
On Wednesday, President Muhammad Khatami hinted that the country's co-operativeness might stop if this were to happen.
On a visit to Germany, Iran's president, Muhammad Khatami, was greeted by thousands of protesters, urging faster reform.
The most dialogue-minded of them, Muhammad Khatami, a former reformist president, has just dropped out of the race.
Mr Ahmadinejad's liberal-leaning predecessor, Muhammad Khatami, was stymied by a squeamish, conservative parliament.
BRAVELY, Muhammad Khatami stretched out his finger-tips, even to the Great Satan itself.
The rioters, who have been disowned by President Muhammad Khatami, face being tried for crimes that carry the death penalty.
Hardliners have seized the chance to accuse President Muhammad Khatami of allowing western-style freedoms to flourish at the expense of Islamic sanctities.
That partly reflects the fact that the economic liberalisation nudged forward by Muhammad Khatami, Mr Ahmadinejad's timidly liberalising predecessor, has been halted.
Muhammad Khatami paid a three-day state visit to Italy, the first Iranian leader to go to Western Europe since the 1979 revolution.
This time, two separate rallies were held after President Muhammad Khatami's supporters refused to attend the one organised by his conservative rivals.
Hardliners in the judiciary may have pressed the charges because they wanted to chill President Muhammad Khatami's slowly warming relations with western governments.
Only last week, President Muhammad Khatami had proclaimed, confidently and with relief, that the two countries had put their crisis-ridden past behind them.
While this drama was being played out, President Muhammad Khatami, still the presumed leader of the reform movement, remained hidden behind the scenes.
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Muhammad Khatami, Iran's president, says he wants to carry on helping with crop substitution, but the warlords of southern Afghanistan are not interested.
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But many hope that the conflict will ultimately lead to the more open atmosphere and the rule of law promised by President Muhammad Khatami.
President Muhammad Khatami is encouraging his young supporters to cheer, applaud and whistle as loud as they like after his speeches to show their admiration.
By coincidence, Mr Yazdi was arrested on the day that Iran's president, Muhammad Khatami, gave a press conference at which he promised to improve the political climate.
Dissatisfied with the slow pace of reforms pursued by President Muhammad Khatami, whose allies dominate the council, Mr Asgharzadeh last year tried unsuccessfully to unseat the president.
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It appears to have been Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, who has dragged him into the fray, over the objections of the country's reformist president, Muhammad Khatami.
Until very recently the field of challengers looked uninspiring, particularly after the abrupt withdrawal of Muhammad Khatami, a liberal reformer who won overwhelming victories to serve as president from 1997-2005.
Moreover, Western officials and analysts point out that Mousavi's primary backers from within the regime - former presidents Muhammad Khatami and Akbar Rafsanjani - are themselves anything but anti-regime revolutionaries.
President Muhammad Khatami has welcomed people-to-people talk, but has not felt strong enough, in the face of the hostility of his implacably Great-Satan-hating adversaries, to extend this welcome to official negotiations.
Several senior colleagues of Muhammad Khatami, a reformist former president, have been arrested, along with at least a dozen journalists close to Mr Mousavi's campaign, according to a website that is tracking events.
Even as Ahmadinejad was glorying in his victory, his opponents - defeated presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi and former president Muhammad Khatami - were calling for a three-day national strike.
It was one of a handful of liberal papers to have fitfully survived the clampdown that followed his election in 2005, which signalled the end of the reformist period under his predecessor, Muhammad Khatami.
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From there he's covered some of the continuing atrocities in Algeria and taken a special interest in Iran, where he reported the surprise landslide election of the reformist President, Muhammad Khatami, and the subsequent power struggle.
At the end of his life, he spoke out in defence of dissidents and lent his support to the reforms of President Muhammad Khatami reforms designed to make the courts less vulnerable to the whims and passions of judges.
The US appeased Teheran by embracing the supposedly moderate government of president Muhammad Khatami, and downplayed Iran's role in terrorist bombings of US targets like the 1996 Iranian-ordered bombing of the US Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia.
When he was elected president in 1997, Muhammad Khatami, a cleric and a son of the revolution, proposed a strikingly democratic manifesto, full of references to civil society and the rule of law, and promised to improve women's rights.
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