The intra-party election campaign — known in the United States as the primaries — is a process meant to select one candidate from several contenders within a party, who will then run as that party’s nominee for head of state in the upcoming election.
In Armenia, in the case of the Civil Contract (ՔՊ), there is little point in holding such an exercise. (I would not envy the party member who seriously tried to compete with Nikol Pashinyan for the position of prime minister — at the very least, some “illegally acquired property” would soon be discovered in his possession.)
During an intra-party campaign, the would-be candidates meet with party members, who must then decide which of them should represent the party. But when the country’s leader strolls through the streets accompanied by cameras — including those of the state channel Public Television of Armenia — dropping into kiosks, hopping onto minibuses, known locally as marshrutkas and little pirozhki (cheap fried pastries) stands, or playing backgammon with passersby, that is no longer an intra-party campaign. It is a classic election campaign — one that law enforcement should probably pay attention to.
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The message of such a campaign is perfectly clear: I’m a simple, ordinary guy, one of the people; I’m not part of that spoiled, thieving pseudo-elite. Especially in authoritarian systems, this tends to be the main “argument” of the leader.
The president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, portrayed himself as a “guy from the neighborhood,” speaking in street language and contrasting himself with the elites of Manila. The leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, hosted the weekly television show Aló Presidente (back when social-media “lives” were not yet the norm) and would speak for four to six hours at a time, supposedly talking with the people “in the people’s language,” bypassing the oligarchs — even though it was widely understood that the country’s biggest oligarch was Chávez himself.
But the record for staging the role of the “ordinary guy” probably belongs to Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi. His personal fortune was estimated at somewhere between 30 and 200 billion dollars, yet he liked to present himself as a simple Bedouin — a member of the traditionally nomadic or semi-nomadic Arab pastoral tribes.
Because he was a “Bedouin,” Gaddafi claimed he would not live in a palace but in a tent — though one can imagine what kind of “tent” that actually was. He would even set it up during his trips abroad. For example, in 2007, when he was invited to France by its president Nicolas Sarkozy, Gaddafi pitched his famous tent on the grounds of the government residence, the Hôtel de Marigny.
Incidentally, that did not prevent France — still under Sarkozy’s presidency — from launching missile strikes against Libya in 2011.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
