According to Vardan Bostanjyan, a member of the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP), the turnout for the city council election will be higher. “The presidential election asserted for the first time that more than half a million people are discontent with the policy we are pursuing, and in such a case, the probability of competition increases. The main struggle will be between the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) and the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP),” Mr. Bostanjyan said during a conversation with www.aravot.am. In response to our question what he thought of the PAP list for the city council and why he wasn’t on that list, Mr. Bostanjyan said: “I have been a professor for quite a long time, I am a full member of academies in a set of countries. Isn’t it a higher status than being a member of the city council?” Then he added that if he was offered to be included in the list, he would refuse. In response to our question why the PAP that hadn’t participated in the presidential election had decided to participate in the city council election, Mr. Bostanjyan stated: “Perhaps in order not to complicate the situation in the country and not to cause clashes, the man was considered as a higher value than participation. Such processes are not expected, as far as the city council election is concerned; there won’t be clashes.” In response to our observation that the city council election followed the presidential election, the discontent with it hadn’t died out yet, and the opposition candidate had taken a radical measure in the square and our question whether the city council election would not be in an atmosphere of tension considering that, V. Bostanjyan said: “Hello, goodbye, I need to have my hair cut, pretension, and stuff like that don’t accord with our mentality. I mean what this man does – chirpy running, leaving and returning, writing letters. The Armenian should understand that power is seized. I use the word ‘seize’ in the positive sense. All kinds of hunger strikes, petty marketplace events cannot be grounds for the desire of power. There are different kinds of performances, and every citizen who attends a performance wants to see a good performance; when he leaves he asks what performance it was and wants to read the script. What happens in political life, in particular, should be done according to a strict logic. Our society has allotted a place, and the president of the country is invited to speak on some street; this is not proper.” According to Mr. Bostanjyan, one should not pin hopes of changes in the situation on Raffi Hovhannisyan. “It turned out that those people didn’t have an alternative and marked there, but it doesn’t mean that the one who is behind it has gained the right to take such approaches on behalf of everyone.” In response to our observation that the non-radical means of R. Hovhannisyan’s struggle were criticized, and the radical means of struggle chosen by the Armenian National Congress (ANC) had also been criticized and our question what means of struggle needed to be employed, Mr. Bostanjyan said: “The events that transpired in 2008, regardless of the fact that the ANC wasn’t able to overcome that barrier, but there at least was progress for our society. We at least realized that what happened in 2008 had no right to happen again. If those events hadn’t happened in 2008, they could have happened now.” And Mr. Bostanjyan doesn’t understand Mr. Hovhannisyan’s steps at all.
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Arpine SIMONYAN
