“Public opinion” is a very interesting category in Armenia. For example, in our internal political life pubic opinion doesn’t play any role. A political party that has very low reputation in the public may win a lot of places during elections and thus accordingly a party that has a very good reputation may stay out of the competition. The mechanisms that regulate this field are quite different in Armenia.
On the other hand, public opinion is considered to be an important thing in the whole world, accordingly the Armenian political powers can’t ignore this. This is the reason why some political parties and people spend much money on their pre-election campaign in spite of the fact that they are sure that they will win not on the basis of free competition, but on the basis of fraud and electoral violations.
In fact the same thing is happening in the foreign affairs field. If our authorities want to escape some developments in our foreign affairs, they try to make them sure that they are not against these developments but the problem is that the pubic opinion is different in the country, etc… Of course this is a very simple solution (actually the international community knows very well that the authorities in Armenia ignore the public opinion in the country), but sometimes it helps. But on the other hand they have to also present the “public opinion” in a way that will not let them think that people are foolish here.
And now let’s go more in detail. After the gas price increase and the failure of Putin-Kocharyan arrangements, we got the following situation: Armenia doesn’t have anything to put on the table and make arrangements besides the status of “being a loyal partner” for them. So how can Armenia have an influence on Russia? What do we get out of this? There is only one way: to revise our foreign policy and refuse the status of the Russian “forepost” (military allocation) in the region.
And now some results of public opinion polls have appeared in the media, according to which if the gas price is increased, 75,7 % of our population will change their attitude towards Russia. What’s more, 59,4 % of our population think that in case of the gas price increase Armenia should revise their foreign policy with Russia.
The political meaning of these polls is clear and we agree with them. But on the other hand there are two things that just don’t fit in. First of all, it turns out that our pro-Russian orientation of these last years was just a result of poor psychology. This means that people think that Russians are good as far as they sell us gas for low prices, and as soon as they increase the price they are bad, and if they make the price go down in the future again, they will become good for us again. In fact it turns out that at any moment the foreign powers may buy our (75,5%) political foreign orientation with money (as well as our military orientation and interests). Everyone will agree that this is not good of us.
Besides that we have already understood that if we have losses when cooperating with another country this is not the “partner” country’s fault, but the fault of our authorities. We can imagine a situation when the fans of a boxer who has lost the competition say that they have changed their approach to the trainer of the competitor. So it would be more logical if the 75,5 % of our population said that they had changed their approach not to the Russian, but to the Armenian authorities.
Anyway this is not such a bad deal. We have to pay more for the supplied gas but at least we will be able to cure our sickness of many years which is called as “pro-Russianism”, and later we will be able to look at the world by taking our national interests in consideration.
We can even say that this deal is a good one for us.