“I don’t think today’s Heritage Party is the Heritage Party, with which we have worked for 5 years in the parliament. Only the brand has remained in today’s Heritage Party and it is strange for me to say that a group of people gathered from absolutely different places became no. 1 opposition 2 days after the list had been made public,” Ara Nranyan, an ARF member, said during a Facebook press conference of Radio Liberty yesterday, talking about the observation of www.aravot.am that political technologist Karen Kocharyan thought that the Heritage Party was the leader of the opposition at present.
Anahit Bakhshyan, a member of the Heritage Party, thanked Ara Nranyan that the latter had made such an assessment during a conversation with www.aravot.am, “It turns out he admitted that the Heritage Party had matured and had become a brand during the past 5 years.” As for the Heritage Party list, Ms. Bakhshyan thinks it is normal to involve new people in parties, “They have many new people on their list too and nobody knows whence. There is no 100% guarantee that all people included in our list will work as the Heritage Party MPs have worked in the past 5 years.” Nonetheless, Ms. Bakhshyan assures that every new member is required to maintain the level of the Heritage Party.
As to the notion that the Heritage Party was a leader at present, Anahit Bakhshyan said, “The Heritage Party has been always pursuing the same opposition line since 2007, since the first day of its appearance in the National Assembly, it has been demanding in terms of the rights of the country and the citizen and the citizen’s violated rights. The ARF cannot compete with us in terms of this – at least insofar as it had been in the government before 2009 and it had been in the government for ten years before that and all those projects and offers that they make these days to attract the people as an opposition, they could have realized those, when they were in the government. And I will say quite the opposite – projects failed when the ARF was in the government. I will mention only two of them.” And Ms. Bakhshyan mentioned the project of the ARF in the field of education about 12-year education, which, according to the MP, “was put on a wrong foundation from the beginning and we have not managed to fix it until now.” Ms. Bakhsyan also recalled that when there was an ARF minister, the Supervision Chamber revealed that apartments for alumni of a children’s home were not bought for the money given for that purpose, “That whole project was such a failure that they haven’t managed to overcome it till now. They managed three fields – education, social affairs and agriculture – what changed in those years, to what extent did they oppose the Republican Party in those fields? They carried out the orders and policy that the Republican Party dictated.”
Nelly BABAYAN
