It is pure logic – when the opposition is inactive, the debate is in the court of the establishment. The Armenian National Congress (ANC) seem to have chosen passive strategy for the past few months – according to certain information they wait for the guest workers to return to Armenia and raise public protest. Because of that passive behavior of the Congress, the attention of the society is drawn to the controversies in the establishment. However, if anyone hopes that these controversies will eventually lead to an outburst, then those are wrong calculations – the “planetary alignment” of 1998 may never happen again.
Certainly, the debates inside the establishment and between the establishment and opposition differ from each other in the level of publicity – when one says “you are for the rule of bandit”, and the other replies “no we are not for the rule of bandits”, there is no shred of discourse here, but, in any case it is clear for the public what issue is on the agenda. Nobody will admit inside the establishment (inside the opposition either) that there are controversies among them – on the opposite, the representatives of the same team will rather snub the journalists “there are rumors as if there are controversies among us, but it is a lie, a fiction – we are united and strong” and so on.
However there is a controversy inside the establishment that perhaps is not put into words during the closed meetings either. The agenda of that controversy is the following – what methods should be used to achieve the victory of the authority team, are strict, rigid methods needed or perhaps mild methods suffice? There has been no such debate for the past 13 years, because there has been no doubt that the rigid methods are absolutely necessary. The fact that such an issue is raised today testifies to a change in the atmosphere. When will the way picked by the establishment become known? Certainly, during the upcoming months. If you open the list of the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) candidates and see that there are people like Schmeiss, Navo, Alraghats in it, know that they have chosen the rigid way. The answer to the question will be known even earlier. If Surik Khachatryan, the governor of Syunik, avoids responsibility again and “escapes”, be sure that the methods will be very strict, rude and gross. So the establishment will admit in that case that in order to guarantee their victory in Syunik they need “figures” like Liska and everyone knows how such people “work” during the elections. In this case, it will be logic if Mher of Tokhmakh is appointed the chief of staff of the RPA Erebuni sub-headquarters.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
