Iran Rafsanjani: "No new presidential ambitions"
Thursday, January 29, 2004 - ©2003 IranMania.com
TEHRAN, Jan 28 (AFP) -- Iran's influential ex-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has asserted he has no intentions of running again for the job in presidential elections next year, the hardline Kayhan paper said.
"For the time being, defiantly not," Rafsanjani, 69, replied when asked if would go again for the president's job in the summer of 2005.
But he did appear to leave his options open.
"Of course we do not know what the condition would be by that time, but what we know for sure is that I do not have the intention and I think there should be an opportunity open for young people and new thoughts," he said.
Rafsanjani, Iran's president from 1989 to 1997, currently heads the Expediency Council, Iran's top political arbitration body. Now regarded as a conservative, he is also regarded as one of the clerical regime's most powerful figures.
Incumbent reformist President Mohammad Khatami's second and final term in office ends in mid-2005.
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