If one asked representatives of both the opposition and the establishment, they would say that they were great strategists of political and, in particular, pre-election struggle and that they knew all tactical nuances. However, it turns out that those unique “aces” don’t know not only “top class” tricks, but also don’t gather primitive information and summarize it. Moreover, I am talking about small Armenia, where everyone knows everyone, where there are only around 1900 polling stations and only 90 majoritarian and 41 proportional seats. How can one be unaware of another under such conditions? How can one otherwise explain that in 15 majoritarian electoral districts pro-government candidates and in 10 electoral districts opposition candidates will “fight” each other? Or that in each of no. 19 and 22 electoral districts 3 Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) members submitted their candidacies. Not to mention rivalry between the RPA and the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) majoritarian candidates – as far as I remember, those parties have signed a coalition memorandum.
However, it is not so harmful for the establishment to work against each other spending double (triple) resources. Firstly people gathered there are not poor and in the end, their rivalry comes to who will spend more money. Secondly, that camp has huge advantage with its financial and administrative resources, therefore, their representatives can afford the luxury of announcing candidates against each other.
In case of opposition forces, it is a different matter. People come to vote for them based on their beliefs and not given financial benefits. It is even stranger that there is no primitive mechanism of information exchange between the Armenian National Congress (ANC), the Heritage Party and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), in particular, who will announce his candidacy where. I, certainly, believe Raffi Hovhannisyan, when he says that he didn’t know that there was another famous oppositionist in no. 7 electoral district, but it is exactly what is strange, because opposition candidates should have informed each other about their intentions in advance. And the most important thing that the three political forces should have done long ago is the following – to gather and decide who has which strong candidate, which struggling proxy and which prepared observer in which electoral district and to distribute them in all polling stations. One mustn’t be a great strategist to arrange all that. I don’t know whether it is possible to do now what should have been done a month ago.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
