Yesterday two MPs, Khachatur Sukiasyan and Raffi Hovhannisyan, dropped their mandates. “As a result of other MPs inadequate stance and vote, and all what happened to my parliamentarian colleagues give me a reason to come to the conclusion that I don’t have anything to do in the parliament any more and I don’t imagine myself in the MPs’ status in the parliament, thus I am dropping my mandate,” writes Khachatur Sukiasyan’s announcement released yesterday. His decision is totally understandable and it will be hard for him even to communicate with those MPs, who did a political order and voted for depriving him from his personal immunity right. However Raffi Hovhannisyan has not explained the logic of his decision to drop his mandate as well. Even though he has promised to come up with a statement to explain his decision, rumors say he has resigned and dropped his mandate because of the recent developments connected with the Armenian-Turkish relations. “The reason is Raffi Hovhannisyan’s personal opinion concerning issues which are very important for the nation,” said the Heritage spokesperson Hovsep Khurshudyan when commenting on Hovhannisyan’s decision to drop his parliamentary mandate. Certainly it is a method of expressing his approach too and sometimes this method of dropping mandates works. However, if it is the only reason why Raffi Hovhannisyan resigned, he could use the parliament and speak out his concerns. On the other hand, it is not quite understandable why he dropped his mandate because he is evidently a supporter of the Western policy. In fact, the US is one of the first supporters of the Armenian-Turkish reconciliation processes.
