The RPA has ultimately decided to run in the municipal elections of Yerevan without coalitions. The RPA already considers this issue closed and have started to forecast by “plus or minus” which of the other parties has chance of votes.
Thus, judging from the last reverences of the Heritage party the RPA has a hope for victory with not just 41% but 50-60%. The decision of the Heritage to run in a separate list and candidate was not a surprise for the RPA. The RPA MPs even before the decision of the Heritage would bet that the Armenian National Congress and Heritage wouldn’t run together and that the Heritage would join the ANC list only if Ter-Petrosyan didn’t lead the list of the ANC. Nevertheless, most of the RPA MPs connected their forecast with the mysterious and closed session of the Heritage, during which the party should have decided the format of its participation in the municipal race of Yerevan. Thus, according to our sources this session of the Heritage was a bluff as the party had long ago decided not to run in a single list with the ANC. Yesterday at the NA many of the MPs send their congratulations to the Heritage MPs for their good decision. Because if the Heritage made the opposite decision then the RPA would have to run the municipal race at least in the same list with the Prosperous Armenia party. This was also the reason why after the statement of the ANC almost all the parties of the coalition were having a hard time answering whether they were running in a single list or not. After the statement of the ANC the ARF and the Legal State were most interested in running in a single list because they perfectly understand that they don’t have the chance to overcome the 7% threshold during elections and compete with Levon Ter-Petrosyan. They say that it is the reason why the Legal State and the ARF linger naming their leaders in the list, someone who’d overcome at least the 7% barrier. Therefore, nobody wants to lead the list, which is predestined to failure from the beginning. And the RPA on its part refused to run the race in an alliance because in that case all the other members of the coalition wouldn’t try too hard to gain votes because they knew that they didn’t have any chance for victory. And in this case, according to the RPA members they will do their best to gain the maximum of the votes for the party. According to the RPA at the end all the votes gained by other coalition members will be counted on behalf of the Republicans. Of course in that case the Prosperous Armenia will have the maximum of the elderly council members but for the RPA it is not so essential. The most important thing for them is to have a republican mayor. It means the more votes the Prosperous Armenia gains the better for the RPA because these votes will be counted on behalf of the RPA. In order to fulfill this scenario the RPA plans that 450.000 people will participate in the elections. And this is how they decided to allocate votes. The RPA decided to grant itself 30-35% of the votes. The RPA plans to “write” 5% to the Armenian National Congress, 20% will gain the Prosperous Armenia, 7% to the Heritage and the rest of the 13% will be given to the rest of the parties. Reminder: Before the decision of the ANC the RPA had a different plan. According to previous calculations the government was planning to give 7-8% to the Legal State, 8-9% to the RFA, 10-12% to the Prosperous Armenia, 20-25% to the opposition and the rest would go to the RPA. So if we add the number of votes of the mentioned 4 parties we will have maximum 54%. For the scenario the RPA also planned to “write” 35% to itself. And the rest would be given to Tigran Karapetich and all the other “wishers.” However, as we already mentioned their plans have been now changed. And now the government is preparing another scenario for the May 31 mayoral election. Due to the Heritage the Republicans started to claim that the mentioned party became a great tool for “writing” votes or in other words, “paper marker.”