Talking with people supporting different political forces and people of different professions, it became clear that the first stage of the local elections didn’t differ from the elections organized in our country so far in any way. This time www.aravot.am got comments on the local elections from Armenian National Congress (ANC) activist Areg Gevorgyan and chairman of journalists’ club Asparez council Levon Barseghyan.
A. Gevorgyan was a member of the commission at 19/02 polling station in the village of Musaler and observed the election. During a conversation with us, he informed, “I didn’t notice any difference between this election and the National Assembly election – there was a relatively normal situation inside the polling station again and outside the polling station, people were directed, there were gatherings of people in front of the entrance, some unknown persons’ presence at the polling station, the police’s omission… we have made a report on all this, which was signed by the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) member of the commission, members of NGOs and journalists. The main unlawful acts were committed by the supporters of the incumbent village headman.”
In response to our observation that the government made appeals and promises before every election, however, there always were violations, the ANC activist said the following, “The reason is that this government don’t have legitimacy, to begin with. They are not elected and in order to keep their power and reproduce, they have to commit unlawful acts and try to be
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elected through violations. This government should step down, in order that we can get out of this circle.”
Levon Barseghyan, the chairman of journalists’ club Asparez council, on the other hand, published an article entitled The Town Is Not Ours; the Voters Wanted That…, in which he talks about the fact that according to the preliminary results, only one – he – out of 7 candidates of The Town Is Ours civic initiative for the town council of Gyumri had appeared among 21 who had won the most votes.
Talking about the reasons for this, L. Barseghyan noted during a conversation with us, “Our ideas were unacceptable for the overwhelming majority of voters. The town is dying and we know it – it is dying in all senses and layers. We proposed new ideas, a new dimension and a new action plan, which were accepted by 7% of the participants in the election. Certainly, we didn’t expect 30%-35%, but we expected more than 15%. My rough estimate is that only 20 thousand out of 46 thousand voters went to vote of their own free will. Roughly 60% were brought to the polling stations or neighborhood principles, one or two kilograms of meat, 1000, 2000 AMD played an important role. So they humiliated the citizen, in order that he is not interested in many other things for subjective and objective reasons. We are really thinking over whether this house needs this plasterwork or whether this house needs another plasterwork. We think that the town has lost, we haven’t. It is just that in our program, there was no promise that the citizen would get two kilograms of meat every day, we would settle issues in the neighborhood through tough guys and would give cigarettes, so we are a bit too much for this town, we went too far, we shouldn’t have been so serious. However, we will make changes, since the initiative was established based not only on the idea of participating in the election, but the idea is much deeper and we have things to do, regardless of whether we are in the council or not.”
Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
