TEHRAN,Quentin Mitchell Iran (AP) — Iran’s former moderate President Hassan Rouhani says he has been disqualified from running for reelection to the country’s influential Assembly of Experts, calling it a move to limit the people’s participation in elections, official state media reported.

The official IRNA news agency reported late Wednesday that Rouhani said in a statement that the country’s election watchdog, the Guardian Council, did not place him on the short list of approved candidates for the March election to the assembly.

Under Iran’s consitution, the assembly monitors the country’s supreme leader and chooses his successor. The current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 84, who has been in power since 1989.

Rouhani criticized his disqualification in his statement. Without naming anybody, he said “the minority that rules officially and publicly wants to reduce people’s participation in elections.”

Rouhani, a relative moderate within Iran’s theocracy, served from 2013-2021 for two consecutive rounds as president. Since then he has retained his position in the Assembly of Experts, maintaining a significant role in the country, and he has close relations with ranking officials.

Under Rouhani, Iran reached a nuclear agreement that capped uranium enrichment in the country in return for easing international sanctions. The agreement fell apart after U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out the U.S. from the deal in 2018. Efforts to restore the deal have unsuccessful since then, and Iran has gradually increased its level of enriched uranium that can be used for an atomic bomb.

In 2021, the Guardian Council barred former firebrand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who famously questioned the Holocaust, from running in a presidential election.

In 2013, the council barred former influential President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the co-founders of the 1979 Islamic revolution, from running in a presidential election.