“I may be wrong, but I don’t believe that Robert Kocharyan will be nominated for the presidential election. He has never been a public figure to enter politics as a public figure now. Besides, the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) could have supported him, but now whom will he enter the game through, will it be self-nomination?” Styopa Safaryan, the secretary general of the Heritage Party, said during a conversation with www.aravot.am, stating that Robert Kocharyan would never enter the game alone. Safaryan doesn’t believe
that the second President of the Republic of Armenia will return and participate in the upcoming presidential election, although he thinks and knows from the past experience that many people return to politics. “I don’t think that he will venture to participate in this election. Besides, all three of our presidents have a common trait, i.e. their too much pride, which they will not allow to be injured by such defeats. I have no doubts that Kocharyan’s participation is doomed to fail. According to the same logic, I have stated many times that if I were Levon Ter-Petrossian, for example, I wouldn’t like to return to politics so triumphantly and leave with 5%-10%, or a person like Robert Kocharyan, being a president for two terms, cannot participate and lose. These are things that absolutely contradict their nature,” Safaryan is convinced. He thinks the struggle in the presidential election will be between Serzh Sargsyan and Raffi Hovhannisyan.
Safaryan stresses that the struggle will surely be fierce, being convinced that there will be a presidential runoff: “Serzh Sargsyan has substantially weakened. And even if he uses all resources and finances available in the country, it will not be sufficient to make people cast their votes for him. Using all that, perhaps, Serzh Sargsyan will win 30 percent of votes, but, anyway, it is not a victory, nor will it end the election in the first round.”
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Eva HAKOBYAN
