Hossein Dehghan, a former IRGC Brigadier-General and advisor to the Supreme Leader, today weighed into the debate about IRGC candidates, stating that a person with an IRGC background is not a military candidate. Dehghan’s reasoning is that although the IRGC is a military corps, it is essentially a political organisation and its members are political actors upon enlistment whose service is “never independent of the social, political and economic aspects of the country…[therefore] they never enter the political arena from a military base as they have never been absent from the political scene”.
