Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei met for the last time with the outgoing members of the Assembly of Experts before the winners of the Feb. 26 elections take office.

Missing from the next meeting will be two of the country’s most hard-line clerics, chairman Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi and Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi. In his address to the assembly, Khamenei called their departure "a loss" and stressed that their losing the election does not “harm their reputation in any way.”

Perhaps no one in the next assembly will be more relieved by their absence than Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani lost the last election for the chairmanship to Yazdi. Meanwhile, Mesbah-Yazdi and the hard-line political group he leads, the Endurance Front, are some of Rafsanjani’s harshest critics. That Khamenei would mention these two individuals by name and lament their absence suggests that should Rafsanjani seek to take back the chairmanship in the assembly, he may find it no easy task.

Khamenei also praised the 62% voter turnout for the parliamentary and Assembly of Experts elections, saying that Iran had better voter participation than the United States. He said that the turnout signifies the people’s “trust in the Islamic system.”