Today, during the press conference, the acting PM Karen Karapetyan replied to the question if he considered Nikol Pashinyan’s request that until the extraordinary Parliamentary elections the ruling majority should elect the people’s candidate as possible – i.e. firstly to elect the so-called people’s candidate of PM, saying: “What does the people’s candidate mean? Explain, please. ”
To the journalist’s overview implying that Pashinyan has explained that the candidate is going to be elected in the Republic Square, Karen Karapetyan responded: “I do not know any country, where the people’s candidate is elected that way. Elections exist for that purpose. There stand our fellow Armenians who are discontented, but how can we measure up? Those citizens want Nikol Pashinyan as the PM and some other citizens want some other candidate. What should we do? Which is the marker? Do you know of any other country where the people’s candidate is elected that way? For that very reason we suggest holding extraordinary elections and if the people’s candidate is him, he will be elected. An alternative option – the Constitution does not prohibit their bloc to nominate their candidate. Let them nominate him. And if they win, then – yes. But we cannot create subjective sections and then say – I am the people’s candidate, I am the candidate for this part of people.”
Asked if he excludes that the authorities will meet that step, Karen Karapetyan answered: “I exclude, inasmuch as the people’s candidate is not elected that way, the people’s candidate is elected through elections.”
“I do not exclude that the person chosen by the people becomes a candidate and it is beyond my will,” he continued.
To the statement constituting that there is a concern that the elections will be falsified again in these conditions, Karen Karapetyan responded that it is the subjective wish of a single political force: “We had elections in 2017 and all of us have fixed that it was better than the previous one, we want o make the next one even better, we are not sure that the next one or any elections are ultimately ideally held in our country, forasmuch as the elections express the illnesses of our political culture and our public. Do you agree with me that we have manifold issues related to education, changing, developing a political culture, debating with one another, discussing, for that very reason the choice of the people is in a single option – elections. Let them gather together with political forces and discuss. We create a platform for that very reason. Let him raise that question, all questions that we are concerned about, we should sit around a roundtable. We respect the large mass of the citizens, but we cannot, we have developed a culture together – the Constitution, the laws, and we cannot act beyond that field. This is a bad signal we are sending to the world, that we regularly… besides the fact that we are falling into a cataclysm, we can subjectively interpret the ‘people’s candidate’ concept regularly. There is no such people’s candidate.”
Lusine BUDAGHYAN
