The Yerevan City Council elections were free and democratic. I don’t think that anyone has any doubts about the results. The biggest problem of the elections wasn’t so much electing people to the Yerevan City Council, but instead how much people trusted Nikol Pashinyan. That problem was solved in the brightest way possible. Over 80 percent of people from Yerevan (and, I think, from Armenia overall) trust Pashinyan (by the way, having 43 percent of people participate is a normal number for local elections; the percent of people who voted in the previous Yerevan City Council elections wasn’t higher).
If I were from Yerevan personally, I wouldn’t have voted for the “My Step” alliance. Not because I don’t like Hayk Marutyan- just the opposite. I don’t like it when people threaten me with things that don’t exist. “If “My Step” doesn’t win, then there won’t be parliamentary elections, and the RPA and Kocharyan will come back to power.” Why are they talking about things that will never happen? Kocharyan and the RPA will never come back into power, and there will be parliamentary elections. That’s what everyone wants- not just 80 percent of us, but 99 percent.
I regard the belief that the people have become citizens with reservations. Just as one of my friends said, citizens don’t chant the name of their leader. If they do, then they don’t rely on state mechanisms, but instead the power of the “savior” and their kind will. People don’t care about the city’s problems and the overall country’s outlook. They care about when and how the old authorities will be punished.
… One of the RPA parliamentarians, who, by the way, isn’t a criminal or an oligarch, got in a car accident- thankfully, nothing serious happened. Dozens of people on social media wrote the types of comments under the articles with information about that which, to put it nicely, said that they wished the accident had a tragic outcome. That isn’t the opinion of a few insane individuals; that’s the opinion of the majority. Most likely, more than 80 percent.
Aram Abrahamyan
