RPA’s terms do not represent the situation correctly, in my opinion. Indeed, thousands of people have a membership card of that party and various incentives have underlain the decision of taking that card but the ideological ones. Those people treat the authorities right in the same way as our hundreds of thousands of not RPA-member fellow citizens. Subsequently, when they speak about the RPA, people mean officials of different levels (school headmasters encompassed). For them the membership card does not have any relation with ideologies or beliefs. It is more an “identification card” by showing which it is possible to avoid of responsibility while taking steps violating the law. They could have been also (and most of them were) communists and Armenian National Movement members.
Lately, by saying RPA, we mean the parliamentary faction. That is, people who, it seems, should have been political actors. But as far as I understand, the primary feature of a political actor should be the adequate perception of the reality. The Republican MPs, mildly said, have an issue with this. Being cut off from the reality, not feeling the pulse of the public, including not imagining the scales of the negative treatment towards them, is specific to certain governmental circles.
Yesterday, during the parliamentary discussions, one of the Republican MPs expressed a thought, implying that in the cities and villages of Armenia dozens of thousands of people have stood against them, but there are people – somewhere in the offices or houses who accept them. It is an illusion. The ordinary Republicans reject the elite with the same strength and anger. The deputies who use the membership card for their own interest, having certain dependence, do not speak up, but as soon as the pyramid collapses, they will throw the membership cards away with pleasure and perhaps will try to seek for a new umbrella-party.
A paradoxical situation is in place. 56 MPs, who have become a parliamentary majority in some way, want a thing and hundreds of thousands of people in Armenia and of equal number abroad, do not and want the opposite of it. However, those 56 MPs do not see, neglect and do not want to step in line with the will of those hundreds of thousands. And on why they do not want, one can predict, of course, but they – those MPs, bring manifold explanations for their “deafness and blindness” – Putin, Saakashvili, wars, sanctions, and others… No one believes in those explanations.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
