A few days ago, Larisa Alaverdyan, the Heritage Party parliamentary group secretary, claimed that the ANC revealed itself during the National Assembly election. www.aravot.am inquired from Zoya Tadevosyan, a member of the ANC, whether she noticed revelations inside the ANC, “It is the business of political forces what assessments to [...]
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.
“The situation commands it,” Artak Kirakosyan, the head of the Civil Society Institute NGO council, said in response to a question of www.aravot.am whether the silence we witnessed in the post-election period wasn’t sort of strange and went into detail, “For example, the explosion of the DIY Club is a [...]
“It is a very objective political process, nothing new is happening from the perspective of political science,” Aram Karapetyan, the New Times Party leader, said in response to a question of www.aravot.am how he would assess the developments concerning the ANC, following the activities of the ANC for the past [...]
For Larisa Alaverdyan, the secretary of the Heritage Party parliamentary group, the National Assembly election was an occasion for the opposition to reveal itself. “The forces that have appeared as opposition since 1990 have revealed themselves. We have seen where the forces that raised a powerful wave in 2004 have [...]
A former member of the Republic Party political council thinks that withdrawal of the Republic Party from the ANC is “a manifestation of Aram Sargsyan’s and his team’s political and civic fortitude.” ”Sooner or later, this decision had to be made. This decision is a manifestation of Aram Sargsyan’s and [...]
The expanded meeting of the Republic Party political council has just ended. During that meeting, a decision was made under Vazgen Sargsyan’s motto “Care for this country” to leave the ANC. Party leader Aram Sargsyan warned in advance that after the meeting, he would not give any interview or make [...]
Members of the ANC advised the Heritage Party at the time to reject offices, in order not to legitimize the rule of bandits. www.aravot.am inquired from Aram Karapetyan, the New Times Party (NTP) leader, when the ANC members had been right, whether they had given bad advice at the time [...]
Ruben Torosyan, the leader of the Human Rights – 96 Party, a member of the ANC, spread a statement on Unprincipled Figures and the Illegal Election. He mentions here that although the 2012 parliamentary election is not over, since the Constitutional Court debates are ahead of us, but some “unprincipled [...]
As we have already informed, Ashot Zakaryan, a former chief of the Gyumri military police, a former prisoner of conscience and an ANC coordinator, stated two hours ago that he leaves the ANC ranks. During a conversation with journalists, he explained that the attempts of the ANC to cooperate with [...]
“The Republican Party didn’t hand out election bribe and the parties that are involved in that the most talk about it,” Karine Achemyan, an RPA MP, expressed this idea during a press conference today. During a conversation with www.aravot.am, Ms. Achemyan explained the fact that Levon Zurabyan, a member of [...]
Participating in the election in a party alliance has many inconveniences. The Republic bureaucratic union of 1995 existed till the end of 1997, when the first president’s positions weakened and the Republican Party of Armenia took sides with the more powerful one in 1998, giving a classic example of rats’ deserting. In 1999, the Union bureaucratic alliance was decapitated during the events of October 27, after which many members of that alliance took sides with the more powerful one once again. The Justice opposition alliance of 2003 collapsed, not playing a serious role in the opposition camp – today, different members of that alliance, Stepan Demirchyan, Vazgen Manukyan, Viktor Dallakyan, Aram Gasparich, take, to put it mildly, different political positions. The problem is that positions are different, to begin with, and those unions are created for pragmatic reasons – to take over the power or to maintain the power – and a light wind, which doubts that it is an efficient tool to maintain or take over the power, is a deadly disease. That is the very reason, why the coalition between the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA), the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) and the Rule of Law Party (RLP) will be most probably maintained and the Armenian National Congress (ANC) party alliance will, at least, diminish. The former continues to be a source of power and, therefore, money and the ANC has stopped being a tool of changing power.
“We held discussions before drawing up the lists for proportional representation and such developments were predictable,” Artak Zeynalyan, a member of the political council of the Republic Party, said during a conversation with www.aravot.am, in response to a question whether he agreed with Aram Sargsyan’s decision to reject the seat [...]
Human rights advocate Vardges Gaspari, a member of the Armenian National Congress (ANC), is not excited about the cooperation between the ANC and the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP), because, for him, the PAP is a political force that participated in the events of March 1, “Which got 300 police uniforms [...]
Petros Makeyan, an ANC member, didn’t see signs of continuing the struggle during the Armenian National Congress rally yesterday. Mr. Makeyan told www.aravot.am that as opposed to the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) and the Heritage Party, which made public the violations registered during the election, but seemed not to have [...]
The statement made by the ANC yesterday that they came to the National Assembly “to deprive the government of power” is funny for Sushan Petrosyan, a Republican Party candidate for proportional representation, “We have heard many years and they not only haven’t done it so we can see, but it [...]
Levon Ter-Petrossian expressed a very apt idea at the time – if you can call this administration “regime” in a mass media publishing legally (not at the level of samizdat), then there is actually no regime at all. Certainly, it is about despotism, which hasn’t been
there during the 20-year history of the independent Armenia and I hope it will never be there. More so now, when there are TV channels broadcasting in Armenia that express the opinions of the two parties and those parties – the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) – took an absolutely opposition attitude during the election campaign. Even if we don’t take into consideration websites and social networks, which are a relatively new phenomenon, and newspapers (opposition newspapers have always been there), then one can assert that the situation in the information field is absolutely new. Opposition TV channels haven’t broadcasted in Armenia – there was A1+, which was independent and which was deprived of broadcasting in 2002, the rest had been “free, but responsible” till April 2012.
Three things are left to do: 1. The political forces “owning” those two TV companies should maintain their relative independence; 2. Those mass media shouldn’t be too partisan and offer an opportunity to other oppositionists – the Armenian National Congress (ANC) and the Heritage Party – as well as representatives of the government and people outside the created system, to express themselves; 3. If the first two conditions are met, the government should be smart enough not to persecute these two TV channels. (By the way, it is interesting why the videos testifying to election fraud are not shown almost at all.)
Dear compatriots, First and foremost, I consider it my duty to thank all the citizens of the Republic of Armenia who voted for the Armenian National Congress (HAK) and the candidates that were running under the majoritarian ticket. I wouldn’t like to speak about the quality of the elections, the [...]
“I think that one shouldn’t see it as a serious thing. In such cases, one should immediately call law-enforcement agencies. We ourselves do relevant work,” Davit Harutyunyan, an RPA head of the state and legal issues committee of the National Assembly, said, in response to an observation of www.aravot.am [...]
On the evening of May 6, the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) will say that the election ոաս held under unprecedentedly transparent and democratic conditions and the Armenian National Congress (ANC) will say that this was the most disgraceful election in the history of Third Republic and unless the people unite and rise up, Armenia will disappear from the world map. Those two extreme assessments don’t have anything to do with the reality, we are as far from democracy as we are far from disappearing from the world map. I don’t want to talk about this threat at all – I cannot imagine what political dividends can be gotten from terrifying of perdition a people that is already terrified “historically” and “genetically.”
There are no grounds for optimistic “democratic pictures” either – the election bribe has already been handed out, the whole administrative leverage has been used, the expanded lists are “fixed,” ignorant oligarchs have already ensured their seats. Under these conditions it is hard to expect that any political force, besides the RPA and the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP), will get a parliamentary group bigger than a 10-15-member group.
