As it was expected, the Free Democrats will participate in the upcoming parliamentary election in an alliance with the Heritage Party. It is a good think from two perspectives. First, the less parties participating in the election, the better – many parties make unnecessary ballyhoo. Second, political forces that stress ideological unanimities are more preferable than those that unite for incomprehensive and unrealizable causes.
The ideology of the Free Democrats and the Heritage Party is liberalism, which is not the most popular movement in Armenia on the political, economic and personal levels. However, classical music is not popular in our country either; does this mean that it is bad? The wrong perception of liberalism in field of economics is caused partially by the fact that many bitter words have been said about “wild liberalism,” “privatization-robbery” and other things during the past 20 years. The majority of my peers are convinced that if, let’s say, factories had remained state-owned, their production would have continued being competitive today and thousands of people would have worked there now. The opposition had said so before 1998 to attract people – mainly the lumpen part of it – and after 1998, the establishment has done so for the same reason and to criticize the “predecessors.” It is interesting that the majority of liberals avoid that word in their speeches, as now they are oppositionists and don’t want to jog unpleasant memories.
However, to explain the situation completely by the “anti-liberal” propaganda of political forces will not be right. Because liberal-thinking people are generally the minority in our society. And political forces are naturally the integral part of our society. Particularly in this pre-election period the leading “ideology” (if it can be called so) of our main parties is paranoia, when they seek international conspiracy and hidden agenda of dark forces behind every word and are not generally ready to hear anything, but honeyed praises. It is interesting that against that background the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) that was extremely aggressive in 1990s (“Have you killed a man?”) seems quite broad-minded today.
The Free Democrats and the Heritage Party explicitly state about their adherence to liberalism, which – let me repeat – is the minority’s ideology in present-day Armenia. Why? The main reason is that only mature people can be liberals (in all senses). And such people are not many in our country yet.
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ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
