President of the Republic of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan made the following promise in his election program five years ago: “The 2008 presidential election will confirm that improving the electoral processes and conducting democratic elections in Armenia are already a tradition.”
Probably the run-up to the presidential election is the best time to cast a look at the processes in the past 5 years and assess the results whether the president of the country kept his promise or not. www.aravot.am talked with representatives of different political forces about these issues.
Stepan Safaryan, the secretary of the Heritage Party, who is a candidate for MP in no. 1 electoral district noted during a conversation with us: “One can talk about the electoral system with many reservations. What we see even in this electoral district nowadays makes one sad. People are not sure that their choice will be respected; they suspect their own state of rigging the election to a disgraceful extent. This very morning, residents said ‘We vote, but they do what they want, anyway.’ If someone says that, it means that he doesn’t trust his own state, it means that the state hasn’t performed its task in that regard. Unfortunately, we can say that Serzh Sargsyan didn’t keep his promise.”
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Garnik Margaryan, the leader of the Motherland and Dignity Party, which is a member of the Armenian National Congress (ANC), stated that Serzh Sargsyan had not kept his promise and enumerated a series of negative phenomena. He said: “Not only did Serzh Sargsyan not keep his promise, but also nothing from the program he adopted has been implemented in the country – we don’t see any progress with regard to the field of social, internal or foreign policy, as well as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement and many other problems. The social condition of the people and the emigration testify to that. The step concerning the Armenia-Turkey relations weakened the foreign policy of the country; it contributed to Turkey’s involvement in the Karabakh issue. I can enumerate tens of thousands of such negative phenomena. The reason is that the system is in the hands of a gang, robbers; the people are exploited, no one looks after the people, and the law doesn’t work in Armenia.”
Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
