In an interview with the Iranian weekly Toloue Sobh, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani officially announced that he will run for re-election to the Assembly of Experts in February. Rafsanjani called the assembly and the coinciding parliamentary elections “one of the most important elections,” adding, “anyone who has an Islamic and national responsibility must prepare themselves to have a presence in the elections.”

Rafsanjani, encouraging others to either run in the elections or vote in the elections, said, “It is not so that some will win and some will lose. The positive or negative result [of the elections] will come back to everyone.”

Rafsanjani ran in an internal election among members to head the Assembly of Experts in March following the death of its chairman, Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani. But Rafsanjani lost to the hard-line cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi. The assembly's role is to elect and supervise the supreme leader of Iran.

Rafsanjani is often referred to as one of the pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He is one of the few remaining clerics to have fought against the shah’s government before the Iranian Revolution and have a close personal relationship with the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But since the 2009 contested presidential elections, Rafsanjani’s political fortunes have declined.