I don’t like, when I quote myself beating the chest “what an accurate prediction I have made.” This time, however, I yield to the temptation; I wrote in my notes dated April 25, “I have no doubts that the RPA and the PAP will form an alliance after the election. I don’t even bet just humanely – why should I use people’s naivety?” Now, when it is almost 99-percent clear that the coalition of the previous convocation will be maintained in its former shape, I must note that it didn’t require being a big fortune-teller to predict that. I just want to ask credulous people not to take what politicians say for gospel, particularly when those are said before an election. For example, before the 2008 presidential election, Levon Ter-Petrossian, the first president and a candidate for president, said that if Serzh Sargsyan became the president, all oligarchs would become homeless. We can assert 4 years after that neither Gagik Tsarukyan, nor Ruben Hayrapetyan, nor Samvel Alexanyan has become homeless; on the contrary, they have multiplied their wealth. Didn’t the first president know that there would be no making homeless? Certainly, he did. However, what he said, as it is commonly called today, was a message – I will take care of you better than my opponent. Oligarchs didn’t believe that message.
Or the Cabinet has been talking about a technopark, a financial center, a north-south stream, an oil pipeline since the autumn of the same year. It turned out after 4 years that they have just laid the foundation of all that and the technopark is just a few labs and the financial center is moving the Central Bank to Dilijan. And generally, the global financial crisis impedes all that. Well, something always bothers a bad dancer. However, when the Cabinet officials said such things, they certainly knew quite well that there would be no “economic miracle.” They just needed to distract our, citizens’ attention or perhaps mind.
In the same manner, when the first and the second presidents suddenly became close to each other (the latter appeared through his proxies, Vartan Oskanian and Hmayak Hovhannisyan and made a speech personally only one day before the election, propagandizing for the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) and against the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA)), it didn’t mean at all that the close relations would be maintained after the election. It cannot be that the RPA and the PAP representing the same economic and political establishment, using the same resources in the same manner will appear in different camps. In Armenia, a change of power took place only once in the form of the 1998 coup d’état. At the time, those who had something to lose immediately took sides with the new government and mainly those whose life hadn’t become particularly harder became oppositionists. Now it is the same – on what did the Armenian National Congress (ANC) pin its hopes, when it thought that the PAP would become an opposition party? Was it deceived by opposition speeches?
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
