The more the presidential election approaches, the longer the list of possible candidates is. Along with men, there are speculations about female candidates. The women have already assessed the current situation and the chances of their victory. We talked also to the men who want to announce their candidacies for the presidential election at the moment.
Arman Melikyan, a former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, didn’t rule out the possibility of announcing his candidacy. www.aravot.am asked him to assess the chances of his victory and inquired whether the fact that many people had announced their candidacies for the upcoming presidential election didn’t cause fear. He said, “If the government’s approach doesn’t change before the election, and the upcoming election isn’t conducted by including dead people again, both my and all the other candidates’, except for Mr. Serzh Sargsyan’s, chances will amount to zero. For example, during former elections when I by no means was the candidate with biggest chances, the official recalculation of ballots in only one electoral district on demand of Levon Ter-Petrossian’s team showed that two hundred votes had been stolen from me alone. So firstly, one should be sure that we will have the Election and not an ‘election,’ and only after that can there be a point in talking about real chances.”
As for the fear of probable dispersion of the opposition’s votes, Mr. Melikyan says the following: “To begin with, no one has officially been nominated yet, and we can say only about three people more or less clearly for the moment that they will be nominated – expert in epos Vardan Sedrakyan, Serzh Sargsyan and Raffi Hovhannisyan. As for the fact that the abundance of candidates may disperse the opposition’s votes, those problems can also be solved, if there is a fair election – I am convinced that in that case the current government will lose in the first or second round, anyway, and the opposition will just have to come to rational and transparent arrangements on the post-election developments.”
Expert in epos Vardan Sedrakyan has also announced his candidacy; moreover, he has already declared himself the president on Facebook. However, not even listening to our questions, he refused to answer, explaining that he didn’t wish to make a comment to either a newspaper or a TV channel that is related to Aram Abrahamyan’s personality.
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Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
