The secretary of the “Justice” faction Victor Dallakyan blamed the National Assembly’s coalitional parties for Armen Harutyunyan’s loss during the ombudsman election held yesterday, claiming that they had not taken into consideration the fourth and primary side of the coalition-Robert Kocharyan.
According to Dallakyan, the closed ombudsman election “showed that the National Assembly is vulnerable.” Does this mean that Robert Kocharyan has something to do with it? In response to our question, Dallakyan, who did not say the name “Robert Kocharyan”, said:
“There is nobody in the world, or any political party that is not vulnerable. The one playing in the game should be the people. As long as these political forces have not realized that they can’t play around with the people’s will and right to vote, they will always find themselves in labyrinths such as the ombudsman’s elections.”
In response to our question as to why this turned into Robert Kocharyan’s loss instead of the coalition’s, when Armen Harutyunyan’s oppositionist colleagues were making speeches against him, claiming that the coalition’s nominee is considered to be on “Kocharyan’s side” and they can’t vote for him, Dallakyan said:
“A. Harutyunyan is on nobody’s side. I know him. He was simply the one that was in favor of the constitutional amendments proposed by the president. But that is a different story. As for the fourth wing (he meant Robert Kocharyan-L.S.), if we give political evaluations, it would be very difficult for the fourth wing to put down the reputation of the other three. But this is a political approach. I think that we can come up with other practical approaches, if we look at it from this perspective.”
We reminded Dallakyan that the “Justice” alliance has always said that Robert Kocharyan chose A. Harutyunyan so that he would defend him because Kocharyan “will definitely need him”. V. Dallakyan said this in response:
“I think we have to look at this from another perspective. Besides the coalition, there are other forces within the National Assembly that went against the ombudsman nominee thinking like this. MPs simply don’t want to be told what to do. In other words, what happened during the election had to do with personal issues and politics.”
In the end, we tried to find out from Victor Dallakyan why he was in favor of Robert Kocharyan.
“I am not in favor of him. We must understand one thing: the National Assembly has to elect an ombudsman for the first time. Perhaps Robert Kocharyan has refused to take part in all this and has let the National Assembly make a choice. Perhaps he wants to show the majority of MPs and the authorities which can’t do anything without Kocharyan. I think that this is possible, but I would not like to make predictions on behalf of Kocharyan. In my opinion, Kocharyan would not like to see something like this happen in the National Assembly,” said V. Dallakyan.