The Supreme Leader’s deputy representative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps says the IRGC never involves itself in endorsing candidates in Iranian elections.
ISNA reports that Brigadier General Mohammad Hossein Sepehr said: “The Guards have never endorsed a candidate in the elections and they will never do so.”
He stressed that the IRGC’s role in the elections is limited to “guarding the achievements of the Islamic Revolution.”
The Revolutionary Guards have been accused of interfering in past elections, especially by many reformist figures.
Mostafa Tajzadeh, a former deputy interior minister who is currently serving a jail term for involvement in the election protests of 2009, has accused the IRGC of “an election coup” in that election, adding that another coup is in the works for the upcoming presidential election in 2013.
Even conservative MP Ali Motahari has accused the Revolutionary Guards of such interference in recent months.
The accusations were highlighted after Ayatollah Khamenei’s representative in the Revolutionary Guards, Ali Saeedi, said last week that the IRGC’s duty is “the reasonable and logical engineering of the elections.”
He qualified his statement after it triggered widespread criticism, telling ISNA the IRGC “only sets frameworks and criteria and this does not signify interference in the elections.”
