The fact that the “Alternative” movement opened the season of rallies definitely was symbolizing what will happen during the upcoming elections, i.e. the season of rallies was opened by a political organization that is not going to participate in the parliamentary elections. Certainly, there will be many rallies, meetings and speeches soon. However, it is not so important. Generally the struggle will develop not between the oppositional and governmental powers, but those believing that they may change anything with the help of elections and those who don’t believe in it.
There was only one change of authorities through elections in the history of Armenia, which is the elections of 1990, when the ANM won the Communistic Party. One of the reasons the mentioned elections were not violated was the fact that the Communistic Party did not have any tools and methods for violating elections since there hadn’t been elections for 70 years before that, thus there was no need to violate elections. The communists had always made parties after elections and published the figures they liked, and during the mentioned elections they could not do that since people would go out to streets and stop them.
What is happening now? Many people think that the goal of the authorities is to win the elections. That is not true. The goal is different: their goal is to annihilate the institution of elections generally and do like in the Soviet times. As the main tool that may stop them from doing so is mobilizing about 100.000 people to go out to streets and struggle, the credo of the government is that “the oppositional powers are not able to take more people out to streets than a couple of thousand citizens”.
The “Alternative” has already organized a rally, the other powers are going o organize rallies too. How did the press cover that information? What did they report? They found several bums among the participants, took their photos and said that only several thousand citizens are attending their rallies. Notwithstanding, even according to the official information during the recent elections over 300.000 citizens have voted for the opposition only in Yerevan. You can conduct a survey and ask these 300.000 citizens whether they believe there may be transparent and fair elections in Armenia or not. Certainly they don’t believe. In fact, it turns out that over 300.000 citizens are disappointed about the governmental powers, they neither believe that the opposition may do anything. This is not the opposition’s problem; this is the problem of the state. Also, the governmental Mass Media companies always laugh at the opposition and make jokes when they criticize corruption and oligarch clans. Isn’t there any corruption in Armenia? Why did the authorities found a commission on fighting corruption? Aren’t there oligarchs’ clans in Armenia? Is it a tale? This system exists and corruption has grown much in our country. If the number of citizens that want to struggle against it does not exceed 2.000, it means that it is the problem of the state.
We understand that TV companies are not real Mass Media in Armenia, but are a medium business (that have several thousand dollar profit per month), it is also clear that medium businesses don’t like political changes and are ready to do anything to survive and keep their places. At least they should understand that their “medium businesses” are recovering the Soviet system of elections in Armenia (there were only two TV companies in the Soviet times in Armenia and both of them were controlled by the same center). Certainly, we don’t think that the owners of TV companies may undermine their businesses “in favor of bright ideas”. Indeed the society should understand and see everything. People should understand that the city administration office of Yerevan will organize free concerts in the squares of Yerevan every day in the pre-election campaign period, which purpose is not doing something good for citizens, but annihilating the institution of elections and imitating elections under the cover of happy concert programs and festivals.
It will be better if the opposition participates in those occasions too. It is how the Soviet government did: they included 15-16% nonpartisans in the Supreme Council. It doesn’t matter who this 15-16% or 30% is represented by. The most important thing is whether the opposition is participating in recovering the Soviet electoral system or not. It seems they are participating; the only difference is the quotas.