Now when Gagik Tsarukyan, the PAP leader, has decided not to announce his candidacy and not endorse anyone, a question arises where 500 thousand votes of the PAP will go. In this regard, Hmayak Hovhannisyan, the President of the Union of Political Scientists, has his own prediction. “You are talking as if those votes were in their chest. The discouraged electorate either partially sells out or doesn’t participate in the election at all. Discouraged people are inclined to think, ‘We should mind our own business, we have made a lot of expenses in the New Year, we should compensate for those expenses; that’s all. Since we cannot be poll-watchers or observers, because the PAP doesn’t participate,’ if they get an offer from the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA), they will go there.”
As for why Gagik Tsarukyan hasn’t been nominated, Hmayak Hovhannisyan thinks: “Oligarchs close to Serzh Sargsyan told Gagik Tsarukyan, ‘You know what, if you spend 20 million, Serzh Sagsyan will make us spend as much, let none of us spend anything, let us fool the people.’ And they have fooled the people. The oligarchic system has fooled our people today, because the elections have become a way of partial redistribution of wealth in recent years. So when there was an election, the rich people would distribute money, easing to a certain extent social polarization. Now it won’t happen.”
As for what will happen in the future, whether Gagik Tsarukyan would submit to Serzh Sargsyan without reservations, what role the PAP would play in the parliament, Hmayak Hovhannisyan said: “The Russians have a very good saying. They say, снявши голову по волосам не плачут (there is no point crying over spilt milk). The milk is gone; the party is compromised. It doesn’t matter what it will do in the parliament. It doesn’t matter whether it will participate in the mayoral elections or not. They used to say that this election was more important than the parliamentary elections. By saying that, they took on responsibility to ensure that activeness with concrete steps. They did quite the opposite.”
Hripsime JEBEJYAN
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Photo by PanArmenian Photo
