Mohsen Rezai, the Secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council, has officially announced his candidacy for the presidential election.
Iranian media report that on Monday March 4, Rezai announced that he is running in the 11th presidential election, slated for June 2013.
He stressed that his focus will be on “programs that assist in reducing expenses and raising household income.”
The former head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) added that the people’s main concern today is economic issues and said: “We must work hard at economic development alongside political development.”
On his personal website, Rezai announced that he will soon present his platform in an official statement.
Mohsen Rezai also ran in the 10th presidential elections against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, MirHosein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. While he at first echoed Mousavi and Karroubi’s allegations of vote fraud, he withdrew his protests after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei refused to take heed of the public outcry and decided to back Ahmadinejad’s victory.
Mohsen Rezai was born in 1954 in Masjed-e Soleyman and, after the 1979 Revolution, became one of the founders of the Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution party, which is now considered a reformist organization and has been outlawed since the 2009 election protests.
Rezai later entered the IRGC and was the head of the Guards for 16 years until 1997.
