Political Entourage
Our political circles and, accordingly, mass media pay too much attention to both the issue of forming or not forming a coalition and the issue of parties’ withdrawing or not withdrawing from the Armenian National Congress (ANC). In this latest process a
serious issue was only the Republic Party’s withdrawal – honest, non-bureaucratic Yerkrapahs, freedom fighters are respected to a certain extent in our society and that party was linked to those circles, this way or another. By the way, regardless of “fidayeen” origins, members of the Republic Party are more broad-minded and less paranoid than some members of the ANC. The Republic Party has a certain “organizational” resource insofar as “fighters” can sometimes resist election fraudsters.
It doesn’t matter whether the other parties – the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the Conservative Party, the Democratic Motherland Party, the Motherland and Dignity Party – will remain in the Congress or will leave it. The leaders of those institutions are certainly respected people, but the problem is that there are no institutions as such there – there are groups of like-minded people, which have no impact on the political stage. I don’t want to say by this that, let’s say, the influence of the Republican Party is conditional on political factors – if Serzh Sargsyan is not the president and the next president doesn’t decide that the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) should be his political backing, there will be nothing left of that “powerful” and “influential” party, the majority will run away at the same speed as it ran away from the Pan-Armenian National Movement (PANM) and the Republic Bloc. If it is decided that the United Armenians will be the government’s backing, that party will become the “most powerful” and the whole bureaucracy will become Pluto’s admirer. The problem is that terms like “political forces,” “parties,” even “government” and “opposition” should be used with serious reservations in Armenia.
