Yesterday I read on the internet that Ani Lorak is going to divorce Marat. To be frank, those names are completely strange for me. It turned out that one was a Ukrainian singer who was also called Carolina in the message and the other was a Turkish businessman. Even if I heard a fragment from that singer’s songs, even if I was affectionate fan of hers, nevertheless, I wouldn’t be interested in who was her husband and how long was she going to continue her family life.
The local bohemian news is more interesting at first glance – Artashes Geghamyan and Paruyr Hayrikyan are going to “marry” the Republican Party and actually be included in the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) pre-election list. The former communist and the former dissident who have parties of their own understand that the members of both will manage to get into one “Zaporozhets” and have decided to join a party that have dissident roots, but are a classical ruling party today, or at least their list. Both are experienced politicians and there is no doubt that they would be better MPs, than the Republican businessmen that haven’t managed to learn all the letters of the Armenian alphabet. Therefore, their eagerness to join the parliament is quite natural, I would even say desirable. Nevertheless, there is no need to conceal this eagerness with additional verbal layer.
In this regard, Mr. Geghamyan’s explanations are more pragmatic – he likes Serzh Sargsyan’s foreign policy, well, and as for the domestic policy, in particular, the economic policy, he will try to fix it from within. Paruyr Hayrikyan, on the other hand, explains his reasons in a more “complicated” manner – since RPA and the Union of National Self-Determination (NSDU) have the same origins, he decided to reestablish the National United Party (NUP) and therefore he inclines to RPA. Firstly one cannot step into the same river – NUP was a group of outstanding people who were struggling for the independence of Armenia under the conditions of Soviet autocracy and not a party in the present sense of that word. Secondly Ashot Navasardyan’s Republican Party resembles the nowadays RPA as much, as the 1988 Pan-Armenian National Movement (PANM) resembles, let’s say, PANM of 1996-97. In the first case, those are unions of people struggling for certain ideas, and in the second case it is a swarm of bureaucrats and oligarchs. Trying to create a new party of it is at least naïve. If Hayrikyan sits in the parliament next to, let’s say, Alraghatsi Lyovik, he will hardly “correct” the latter by that.
