The National Rebirth Party will back a united candidate at the upcoming presidential election. The party will not propose its candidate for presidency.
“Presently, political forces are grouping. They will soon name a joint nominee and we shall second him,” the leader of the party Albert Bazeyan said. . Bazeyan didn’t rule out that the united candidate might be former president Levon Ter-Petrosyan. Does the National Rebirth Party cooperate with other parties for this purpose? “No, in fact no negotiations are taking place presently. Negotiations were proceeding among those parties, which were planning to run during the elections. But as it turned out the intentions of the opposition parties to unite didn’t come true. It’s obvious that several candidates are going to run,” he said and added that this is the reason why they are more occupied with internal party building. “There are certain angles of agreement of the union of three parties – National Rebirth, HRAK and the Alliance parties. Time will show the rest. I don’t wish to express a concrete standpoint right now because this approach will be concretized during the joint congress. It won’t be right for us to express our standpoint separately,” Bazeyan said. According to him this joint congress of parties will be held by the end of the year. But if they don’t manage it by then it will be held in January of the next year. “At that time it will become clear, who is going to run and what approaches and ideas are going to be applied. Based on that we will make our decision during our final congress,” mentioned Bazeyan. Let’s note that Bazeyan has mentioned that there won’t be a joint candidate form the opposition and that several of them will run. In that case what criteria are they going to use to figure out, who they are going to support? “Various factors will have influence on our attitude. Of course, a lot depends on the platforms, ideology of the candidates to run, internal and external policies, attitude about Karabagh conflict resolution. The last one will probably be the most important factor for us. For example, in 2003 many political forces supported Stepan Demirchyan because such was the orientation of the society. We followed the desire and wishes of our citizens,” he said. Therefore, first the mentioned parties are going to unite and then think about supporting a joint candidate.