The Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) and the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) representatives informed mass media half-officially yesterday that they would not participate in TV debates with either each other or other forces participating in the parliamentary election “at this stage.” It is not clear yet how long this stage will last. I cannot say what the reason for such a strategy is either; it seems that there are good orators in both teams – Artashes Geghamyan, Khosrov Harutyunyan, Gurgen Arsenyan, Hmayak Hovhannisyan. Admittedly, the debates, in which they will participate, will be more like monologues, because it will be very difficult to stop the flow of these politicians’ thoughts, but it is obvious that they will not yield to any oppositionist. For example, when I am offered to participate in a debate, I refuse, because I know that I will be defeated, because I think that crushing someone, “bringing him to his knees” and pillorying him in a logomachy is an unserious and childish thing. However, politicians, certainly, must be engaged in such debates, particularly, in the pre-election period.
Thus, having outstanding spokespersons in their ranks, two member-parties of the ruling coalition still reject debates. Debates are not so interesting without them, because the rest perform the role of accusers and the accused is not there. Certainly, there can also be other configurations – the Armenian National Congress (ANC), the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) and the Heritage Party may argue which one of them is more opposition and more “decisive,” but there cannot be any deep controversies among them, because they should assert that the situation is bad, there is emigration, corruption, monopolies etc. If no one opposes in these issues, there is basically no debate.
Admittedly, yesterday I was conducting a debate on A1+, which, in my opinion, was quite unusual – the representatives of the ANC and one of the supposed outsiders the Democratic Party of Armenia (DPA) participated in it. The Congress member said that the situation was bad and the Democrat claimed that it was bad, but the current establishment was not so much guilty of that, as the Pan-Armenian National Movement (PANM) that had ruined the beautiful Soviet country, had closed factories, had stolen everything and being guided by doubtful Western prescriptions, had adopted wild liberalism in Armenia. Let me just remind that from 1998 till 2012 there was quite much time to fix all that and assessments of the PANM mistakes are a task more of historians, rather than politicians today.
At least for me that debate was informative – I understood why the DPA participated in the election.
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ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
