The extraordinary session of the National Assembly that kicked off yesterday was vital not as much for the discussion of the government program or the behavior of the opposition (the government doesn’t have a problem adopting it) but for seeing and understanding what thee second force of the National Assembly, the Prosperous Armenia, is going to look like for the upcoming years. It turned out that nothing special is going to be different. According to the NA bylaw, the party which doesn’t become a part of the executive government should declare that it is an opposition party. Yesterday so did the ANC, ARF, Heritage parties. The Prosperous Armenia didn’t declare anything. The problem here is not the NA bylaw because it is not as much an imperative requirement of the law as a rule of a game in politics. Parliamentary parties normally declare whether they are opposition or government. However, the PAP despite its statements (constructive opposition, extremely constructive opposition, etc.) avoids directly saying whether it is an opposition party or not. This in fact is a novelty in the political life of Armenia not because in the past we didn’t have parties like that. During different period governments created smaller parties, which called themselves “constructive opposition.” The current situation is unprecedented because under this status we have not some small-scale party but the second largest party in the parliament, which will still function in the formula of “government in the opposition and opposition in the government.”
