Hmayak Hovhannisyan, the president of the Union of Political Scientists, thinks that political forces cannot and will not be able to strike a balance concerning proportional and majoritarian representation issue, because positions are polarized.
Today, during a meeting at the Union of Political Scientists in regard to this issue Aram Safaryan, the PAP parliamentary faction secretary, presented the viewpoint of the party. In his words, the PAP proposal to hold parliamentary hearings on this issue was caused by a few things, “The issue has a social resonance and we think that we must show appropriate attitude toward that. We would like to remind that our party has an article of switching to proportional representation in our party program adopted in February 2007. The vision of our political system in the future is the National Assembly formed through proportional representation. The parliamentary faction and the political council of our party have not organized a discussion on this issue yet and don’t have a viewpoint. We think that our viewpoint can be formed after the parliamentary hearings that will take place on February 16, taking into consideration opinions of all parties for and against and afterwards we will express our political position.” He also said that some members of their party’s political council proposed not to discuss the issue of switching to 100% proportional representation at the moment, but to find “a moderate solution by increasing seats for proportional representation and decreasing seats for majoritarian representation. We think that increasing the number of MPs elected through proportional representation and the role of proportional representation can increase the importance of parties in our legislative body.”
Arpine SIMONYAN
