Thus the government of Armenia has a program for the coming five years of governance. It may provisionally be called a “spiritual program”, “romantic program”, etc. The selection is pretty big. The thing is that the Prime Minister compared the mentioned program with the spiritual unity of the people and even cited the words of Nerses Shnorhali about the importance of people’s faith in the future, and even spoke the “For you, Armenia” slogan. It was a good speech, and truly said Serge Sargsyan didn’t even go very deep in the “quantitative analysis” of the program and preferred to signify the spiritual aspect. Why would the quantitative indexes be important? The important thing is the spiritual vision and the environment of friendliness.
Too bad Raffi Hovhannisian messed all this up. He stood up and started to “spoil the atmosphere” by saying that the mentioned program doesn’t reflect the needs and concerns of the people at all. He also complained that the program was proposed too late. This person wasn’t able to examine only 42 pages in half a day. Thus the Prime Minister and the rest of the Republicans were quite right when they blamed Hovhannisian for messing up the “blessed day”.
Secretly said, Sargsyan was right to name Hovhannisian’s speech as “spoiling the atmosphere”. In fact, the chairman of Heritage is busy with that. Raffi Hovhannisian is an amazing man. He had been complaining about the crimes committed by the government for a very long time before elections and now, having appeared in Parliament, he gets surprised that the government doesn’t provide mechanisms for the development of the country. One may really think that Hovhannisian has great hope for fighting against corruption and providing equality of law for all, etc. If he really believes that, that’s fine, but if he doesn’t, then he really was “spoiling the atmosphere” at the Parliament.
So what happened after the Parliamentary elections and formation of the new government? An “ideal” situation has been created in the country. The government writes beautiful words on paper, pretending that it’s a program of activities. The deputies pretend that they are aware of that program and push the button and everybody feels satisfied. The discussion of the program is a real formality. In fact, if the government was honest, it would write just one sentence in the government program – “They will send money from Russia, we will buy food and try to survive.” This is the whole program.
Nevertheless, Sargsyan shouldn’t have gotten angry with Hovhannisian. The behavior of the Heritage party fully fits in the genre rules. While the NA is presenting a performance, it would be interesting to have some new actors to provide a new acting flavor. Moreover, Hovhannisian is very good at playing his bit part. He writes a letter to the speaker Tigran Torosyan and sends it to his office by post (it’s located a few steps from Hovhannisian’s office). He knows perfectly that nothing is going to be changed as a result. And finally, why would the parliamentarian majority act and Heritage not? Everything is fine. You pretend you are submitting a program and I pretend that I oppose.
And, finally, that is the reason why Heritage entered the Parliament, to pretend it fights against the “bad phenomena” (corruption, violation of human rights, etc.). If its goal were not to pretend, it would have actually agreed to plans for a united opposition instead of ruining those plans.