Levon Ter-Petrossian made a “political analysis” of cooperation with the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP), and it arouse the anger of a set of oppositionists, and in the end, contributed to the collapse of the Armenian National Congress (ANC), as a coalition. Only the supporters of that “analysis” will join the party by the same name. Raffi Hovhannisyan openly met with Gagik Tsarukyan, but that event was almost disregarded by his supporters, as well as other political forces and commentators. It seems that it is a big injustice why one is allowed and the other is not. However, there are two factors here. The first one is that all the same, Ter-Petrossian’s former supporters have a reason to criticize the first president, because everything can be judged by its result. If in the autumn of 2012, Ter-Petrossian had been announced as a candidate and had been supported by the PAP, or Tsarukyan or Oskanian had been announced as a candidate and had been supported by the ANC, the “political analysis” would have been 100% accurate and efficient. As we know, winners are never judged. Certainly, one of those candidates wouldn’t have necessarily won the election, but there would have been an absolutely different, a more favorable situation for the opposition after the election. However, none of those candidacies was announced, and no satisfactory account of that was given. Moreover, some representatives of the ANC stated that those who announced their candidacies for the election were marginal persons, participants in a farce, and legitimizers of the regime. However, it has turned out that the significance of the ANC and the PAP (at least for now) has diminished, and Raffi and the Heritage Party have started to play a more important role. Therefore, people can blame the “political analysis,” as opposed to the meeting between Raffi and Tsarukyan, which no one, including the participants in the meeting, cares a hoot about. The second factor is that Levon Ter-Petrossian, as opposed to Raffi, draws a clear distinction between the friends and the enemies; you are either with the people or with the regime. For a long time, the test of that has been whether you demand Serzh Sargsyan’s resignation or not. We don’t discuss whether this divide is right or wrong. However, when the leader of any force puts forward such strict standards, then it unavoidably leads to the leader’s supporters’ arbitrarily adding their own standards, which are stricter and sometimes become a means of settling scores. However, if there are “good guys,” those who struggle for democracy and the constitutional order, and “bad-guys,” representatives of the criminal regime, the gang rule, and the criminal oligarchic system and their servants, then which standards does the PAP adhere to? Raffi Hovhannisyan makes no such distinctions. (Let us assert again that it is hard to say whether it is good or bad.) However, due to the lack of those distinctions, his meetings with Gagik
Tsarukyan or, say, Hovik Abrahamyan are considered as normal, as an ordinary political process.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
