Governmental political forces have started to actively and illegally campaign and the TV companies are actively stimulating election bribes.
Such an opinion was made in “Pastark” club by PPA member, NA “Justice” faction member, MP, Grigor Harutyunyan. According to him the opposition cannot violate the law. Based on this we may suppose that the opposition is planning to participate in the coming elections just like it did previously or in other words, as once mentioned by former NA deputy-speaker, Karapet Rubinyan, “play football in the event when the opponents are shooting”. By answering our question yesterday Harutyunyan mentioned, “Do you want me to say that we are going to violate laws? Do you think it’s a normal answer? We don’t want to violate laws because it’s not a normal thing to bribe the public.” He thinks that everybody thinks that gaining votes through all kinds of means is justified. “That’s not right. We should have conscience for our people. What can the opposition do? Shall we pick rifles and shoot? We only ask the authorities to talk more to people and enable us to talk to them. There is no need to consider the public as illiterate mass,” said Harutyunyan and added, “Do you think it’s impossible to raise pensions or minimal salaries in our country? Or do you think it’s impossible to increase this budget by three times. The authorities don’t want this because whatever was supposed to go to the state budget went straight to their pockets. They keep treating people like hobos and buying votes.” Nevertheless, the Justice faction secretary, Harutyunyan mentioned that so far we don’t have any groups of international monitoring organizations registered in the country. Armenian government hasn’t yet sent invitations to those countries, and no one knows when it will. According to Harutyunyan PPA is ready to participate in the elections on its own, however the format of participation is not decided yet. “Our party has always participated in elections within an alliance or a bloc because our party has a power of uniting others and our country needs opposition parties to unite,” he mentioned. Meanwhile Harutyunyan mentioned that PPA wouldn’t ever form blocs with those parties, which have previously violated elections and brought people to such poor conditions. Regarding the “opposition 41 candidate” operation Harutyunyan has a normal opinion but according to him there is an “important moment” here. The important thing is to make sure that the leaders of the greatest opposition parties jointly take part in the process. “If they participate a serious process might start,” he stated. There is also a viewpoint, by which the reason that the opposition failed so many times is that there are certain “mines” within the opposition. Did the opposition figure out, who the “mines” are. “We have one principle. It’s better to make a mistake by believing than by not believing,” he said. He also informed that compared to 2003 certain changes were made in the platform of the PPA. In past the party prioritized relations with CIS countries. Now the tendencies are more European. “Because our experience showed that cooperation with western states is more profitable than with CIS states,” said Harutyunyan.