It seems that there is now some certainty as to when the snap parliamentary elections will take place. But, who will hold those elections? Both the ruling party and the opposition are accusing one another of rigging elections, and both sides have serious reasons to believe that.
There is also talk about the flaws in the Electoral Code, and those rumors also make sense.
I have no doubt that the ministries, regional administration, all law enforcement agencies, and the pro-government oligarchy will work for Pashinyan and his ‘team’ in the upcoming elections. Over the past three years, all these structures have already managed to manifest themselves in the exact same way as they did in the previous 30 years.
On the other hand, I believe that the methods used prior to the revolution to rig elections, such as causing rifts outside of polling stations, stuffing, falsifying numbers, and even election bribes will not be widespread.
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But let’s think about the deeper issue. In the second decade of the 21st century, taking into consideration the characteristics of information flows, is holding elections to establish a government as effective as it was, say, 30-50 years ago? Around 5-6 years ago, the post-truth understanding became very widespread in the West. That is a situation in which people’s internal beliefs and emotions are more important than the facts. That is especially exacerbated by the fact that modern people are under the ‘pressure’ of information 24/7. It’s not the same as it was before: you read the newspaper, go to work, come home, watch the news for 30 minutes, and relax. Today, websites and social media follow us everywhere and all the time.
In the circumstances, we truly encounter a situation in which ‘a lie manages to cross half the world while the truth is still putting on his pants’ (the saying is attributed to different people, from Mark Twain to Winston Churchill). Today, it has been scientifically proven that ‘fake’ news circulates on social networks 6 times faster than accurate information.
The examples are everywhere. The ‘Brexit’ propagandists convinced the majority of people in Britain that it costs their country 350 million pounds every week to stay in the EU (let’s compare this to how it was said on Freedom Square in 1988 that operating the Nairit only made Moscow wealthier). However, experts and those responsible frequently published documents according to which that ‘350 million’ number was fake and the true number is at least 10 times less, but the average person in Britain refused to believe the experts. Donald Trump is an undefeated master of spreading ‘post-truth.’ He claimed that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and that he was a Muslim, that the coronavirus was being treated with ultraviolet rays, that global warming had been invented by the Chinese to destroy the American industry. And most Americans have long considered him to be the most honest politician in their country.
After all of this, we need to ask ourselves once again what it means to rig elections in modern times when the opinions in society are already falsified.
Aram Abrahamyan
