Today it is already possible to predict how the authorities plan to hold the Yerevan Council of Elders (municipal) elections scheduled for September 17. During the election campaign, propagandists will take out the skeletons of the “formers” from the dusty shelves and scare people with them. During the voting, in the same style as the “previous ones,” they will use the administrative levers and the potential of the local rag-tag crowd (the so-called “tasovshiks”).
What allows me to make such assumptions? First of all, these well-known methods were already used during the “Hayakve” signature collection, even though it was only a legislative initiative. Well, the topic of “formers” is eternal; all those who are the actual (not “decorative”) oppositionists of the government must certainly be “connected” to Serzh Sargsyan or Robert Kocharian.
In the case of regimes like Russia or Armenia, there should not be honest elections; any election is an event to express support for the “popular leader”; political scientists call it “acclamation.” In the “Western” sense of the word, opponents are also not planned. There must be participants in the elections (like Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky) who legitimize the reproduction of the first person or his representative with their presence. And even if there are government opponents, they cannot be of local origin; where can “saints” and “geniuses” like Putin or Pashinyan get domestic opponents? They are either “foreign agents” or “the fifth column.”
Considering all that, the Yerevan Council of Elders elections will be essential because they will answer at least three questions. 1. Has the Armenian society (a large part of it, which lives in Yerevan) come to terms with the existence of the government that brought about the national disaster, 2/ are the methods of reproduction used for decades viable, 3/ will the oppositionists be able to draw the attention of Yerevan residents to the most severe problems of the capital? :
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Aram ABRAHAMYAN
