“You know quite well in what country we live, where struggle for mayoral elections is not realistic these days. We will have what we had during the parliamentary election,” Lyudmila Sargsyan, an MP representing the Armenian National Congress (ANC), told Aravot yesterday. Admittedly, this is an accurate, sober and realistic assessment. But if I wrote such a thing, the representatives of the same opposition would say that I dashed people’s hope and faith, disseminate conciliatory and timeserving sentiment instead of inspiring the people to fight a holy war etc. When an opposition MP says that the struggle for the mayor’s office is not realistic, it, nonetheless, causes certain confusion. As far as I understand it, the opposition’s mission is to offer an alternative. For example, in the town of Gyumri, where, according to the local human rights advocates, 5000 people are homeless, Vardan Ghukasyan hasn’t solved that issue and Samvel Balasanyan is not going to. The task of the opposition candidate for the mayor, in my opinion, is the following – to find ways to reduce the number of those people at least by 1000 within 3 years and to offer those ways to the voters. After that, the election takes place the way Ms. Sargsyan described. In 3 years, when the number of homeless is still 5000, the opposition says “you see the government couldn’t solve this issue.” If an alternative and, respectively, an alternative candidate are not put forward, such issues “are condemned” to eternally be among unsolved ones.
“The ANC will participate at the level of both community leaders and council members,” the ANC parliamentary group member also said. The Congress hasn’t announced any candidate at the “level” of either community leaders or councils, at least, so far. And not only the Congress, but also the Heritage Party, the Communist Party and a set of other political forces don’t want to use these elections to propagate their ideas and proposals. In that sense, local elections will not be alternative ones.
And what is officially called “alternative” is just ridiculous. According to the law, more than one person should be registered as a candidate. And so shrewd village headmen and mayors have found a solution – they register their relatives and party friends – some naïve people thought that the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) members would struggle against each other – as “alternative” candidates and then those tame “alternatives” withdraw their candidacies. This is the case when the letter of the law is formally complied with, but in reality, there is no rivalry.
Certainly, it is not like this everywhere – a serious “battle” between the RPA and the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) is expected in a few communities. But it would be a gross exaggeration to call that struggle between influential clans “alternative struggle.”
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Aram Abrahamyan
