“As a political factor, Raffi Hovhannisyan is no more,” political scientist Hrant Melik-Shahnazaryan expressed this idea during a conversation with www.aravot.am, assessing whether the events that took place on April 9 were in accordance with democratic principles and the law. He stated that the page of the presidential election was turned. The political scientist sees a contradiction between R. Hovhannisyan’s words and deeds and goes into detail: “Raffi realized quite well that his statements were not realistic, and he didn’t declare himself president in Freedom Square. And he also didn’t put forward the composition of the shadow Cabinet; he just talked about establishing the public council. At this moment, any action should be considered as an effort to win the support of society in the run-up to the upcoming mayoral election.” Talking about the clashes, H. Melik-Shahnazaryan stated: “It is obvious that this movement has no organizational skills whatsoever. He had stated before April 9 that the inauguration day would be a revolutionary day, but we saw that it didn’t differ from any other day in any way. As a result, society tried to change something by itself, made an independent decision to go along Baghramyan Street to Tsitsernakaberd. And at that moment, R. Hovhannisyan was the leader in form only; he was the leader no more, even Andreas Ghukasyan who had won only 0.3 percent of the vote tried to become the leader, and people were ready to follow even him. This made an important psychological change in people’s minds, and soon the process of looking for a new leader will start. At the same time, one of the important things that happened yesterday is the death of environmental movements. Yesterday the environmental movement died on the streets of Yerevan. Civic activity that they attempted to achieve basically fell victim to political ambitions.” Political scientist Yervand Bozoyan, in his turn, thinks that what happened on April 9 is normal for the post-election developments of recent years. And in order to solve that issue, he offered the following option: “This issue was politically solved in Ukraine in 2004 and in Georgia in 2003. If society thinks that one can achieve a change of power through elections alone, it is a deception. Elections should become a pretext for the opposition forces to be able to give a response to the government through broad consolidation. This proves once again that the government can be defeated only under the conditions of broad consolidation. They create such a machine through consolidation of all non-governmental forces that will be equal to the government machine. Only then can one change the situation through elections. Otherwise, the result is what we see. A new leader emerges whose movement the government crushes at the last moment. The past experience has shown that R. Hovhannisyan’s team cannot oppose the state machine.”
Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
