Since there are less than three months left until the official announcements of candidates for the presidential election, the main political forces must prepare the society with at least some hints who will participate in the presidential race in the short run. For example, today Levon Zurabyan, the Armenian National Congress (ANC) coordinator, expressed his own opinion in an interview given to the P.S. show of A1+ saying that there would be a point in
organizing the Congress’s rally when Levon Ter-Petrossian made up his mind whether he would or wouldn’t announce his candidacy, because participants in the rally would like to know what the ANC tactics in the presidential election would be like, besides hearing criticism. That approach seems logical to me, although there is also another theory, according to which the longer you keep people in the dark, the better. In any case, no matter how much the first president wants to return to his books as soon as possible, he will announce his candidacy, there are no two ways about it, as the saying goes, since otherwise, the Congress will not exist as a united force anymore. It is clear that all the ANC leaders think only of Levon Ter-Petrossian as superior to them and they see no one else but themselves in the second place, which means that they will not accept any other candidacy.
It was an interesting coincidence that Vartan Oskanian, a pivotal figure of the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP), talked about the same issue expressing an idea that his party had to announce its own candidate and it was desirable that this candidate was Gagik Tsarukyan, but if the latter didn’t agree, he, Oskanian, was also ready to participate in the election. It is also an absolutely right approach – a party having a certain electorate and certain financial resources should announce its leader and not help other politicians, including former or current presidents.
It turns out that the best candidate for the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) is Serzh Sargsyan (it is obvious without any analysis), the best candidate for the ANC is Levon Ter-Petrossian and the best candidate for the PAP is Gagik Tsarukyan or Vartan Oskanian. If nothing unusual happens in the next three months, the main candidates for the president will be these four politicians. If it happens so, it seems to me that their competition will be more peaceful, calm and, one could say, “classic” than it has ever been during all the previous presidential elections. I have already said that I don’t feel any danger from those four politicians, because they, being very different, are people without serious mental disorders.
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ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
