Alexander Arzumanyan, a member of the Free Democrats Party parliamentary group and an MP, thinks that the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) leader, Gagik Tsarukyan, hasn’t announced his candidacy also because of the secret arrangements during a meeting with incumbent President Serzh Sargsyan.
“Of course, it was related to that, being an oppositionist is a mission, and it is hard to combine using the government leverage, sponsorship, engaging in business and being an oppositionist. These are approaches in contradiction with each other. I have never expected that a serious, big businessman could be an oppositionist,” the MP said to www.aravot.am.
Mr. Arzumanyan regrets that political forces have engaged in intrigues recently instead of contributing to political processes, developments, “I am sorry that we have engaged in inner-party political intrigues recently. Backstage talks between a few parties. It prevents us from being active on the political stage. It is unfortunate that such processes started before the parliamentary election, and a big part of the opposition voters got confused, and they, not going into it, cast their votes for a party boasting of being an opposition or being presented by other opposition forces as such.
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Furthermore, he described the confrontation between the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) and the PAP as inner-family fights, “The PAP has represented and represents the government.”
In the MP’s opinion, the PAP’s playing an opposition distorted the opposition camp, “As a result, we have what we have. There is no opposition candidate that will be able to consolidate the opposition camp; there hasn’t been done anything serious about that at least recently.”
In response to our question whether there was an opposition candidate that could be a serious rival to the incumbent president, Mr. Arzumanyan said: “If we talked about free, fair and transparent elections in compliance with the European standards, any citizen of the Republic of Armenia would be a real alternative, because an ordinary citizen under these circumstances cannot vote for the government that exploits it every day.”
Arpine SIMONYAN
