The announcement of a joint format for Armenia’s opposition forces, proclaiming four goals and the pooling of efforts to pursue them, has naturally attracted considerable attention, given the situation in Armenia and around it.
Nevertheless, it should be noted that, in essence, nothing has happened yet. This is by no means excessive or unwarranted pessimism, nor would such pessimism be helpful. It is simply that excessive and unwarranted optimism can hardly be any more useful—if not substantially more harmful.
Armenia has seen the consolidation of opposition forces before. Nor is this the first time discussions have revolved around a formula roughly along the lines of “consensus minus one,” with “the minus one” invariably understood to mean the government. Such episodes occurred even before 2018.
Thus, the pooling of opposition efforts is an important, but by no means sufficient, condition, as the saying goes in such cases. What matters greatly is how and in what respect this pooling of efforts will differ from previous, fruitless attempts at unification.
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And here, perhaps, it is crucial that these efforts operate under, or be guided by, not the principle of “consensus minus one,” but rather “consensus plus one.” In this case, that one is not the government, but the public.
The public must not be a mere consumer of the process, waiting to hear what calls or appeals will come from the opposition “headquarters.” It must be a participant, offered substantive and multifaceted proposals—from the value-based architecture of social coexistence to phased or package-based solutions to the country’s problems.
The public must be offered a “parallel” platform for coexistence: a civilizational one, not merely a socio-political one.
In that case, the statistical pooling of efforts will yield a qualitatively new outcome and outlook, unlike anything seen in Armenia so far. This is by no means merely a question of the sincerity of the struggle for change; it is a question of changing the methodology of political work.
Moreover, this is something that has, in essence, already had its own successful “pilot” in the form of the parliamentary election result, which has now confronted the incumbent government with a concrete fact.
Hakob BADALYAN
