Perhaps after a hot summer season the political forces of Armenia will get to the hot period of evident pre-election campaign during the fall season. In spring of 2012 parliamentary elections will be held and in order to provide desirable results the parties should deploy their resources and work hard closer to the upcoming race.
In this regard perhaps the currently ruling party, the RPA will be most active in outlining the map of the upcoming political picture. The rest of the political forces regardless of their popularity within the society will have to negotiate with the Republican party for winning their seats in the parliament. Judging from the current situation there is an opinion that it is up to the Republican Party and particularly its current chairman, the incumbent President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan will determine the seats of each party in the new parliament. Of course even in a country like Armenia, where the society has total distrust to elections a drastic development of the situation is not excluded. For example, the possibility of extraordinary national elections this can happen or even during the scheduled race the situation may deviate from the control of the RPA and Serzh Sargsyan in particular. This would resemble the situation of 2008. But as long as the society is not active about the possibility of extraordinary elections and the conduct of the scheduled elections of 2012 the current government sketches the map of the upcoming race. The governmental circles claim that the RPA will do its best to retain its current seats in the parliament. The RPA has an absolute majority in the parliament. Originally it had 63 MPs and starting from the fall of the last year 4 more independent MPs joined the RPA faction. It means that during the upcoming race the RPA is going to lose all of its administrative levers to maintain and strengthen its positions. We have already informed that 66 out of 913 communities of Armenia are headed by the RPA nominees and 203 of them have non-partisan heads. Moreover, 33 out of 48 cities have Republican mayors. And as the practice has showed in Armenia the outcome of elections is determined not by the choice and the free will of the citizens but the good and painstaking efforts of the RPA local government heads, who use their levers to provide victory for the party. And so the RPA, which has such means, has already started to outline the map of the upcoming composition of the parliament. According to that map the Prosperous Armenia party can also have representatives in the parliament. This party used to have 26 MPs in the parliament and three more MPs had joined this party. But the RPA has decided that the Prosperous Armenia should have fewer seats in the next parliament. In private talks the members of this party mentioned that during the elections of 2007 the President was Robert Kocharyan. And the latter provided so many seats for the party. According to the versions discussed among the RPA members Sargsyan will try to curtail this number by half. Besides that the RPA MPs speak that the Prosperous Armenia has not pursued political correctness and it was first the Prosperous Armenia they made 2 non-partisan MPs become Prosperous Armenia members. Perhaps the next governmental coalition party Legal State will not emerge in the next parliament. Recently such a hint was provided by the RPA faction chairperson Galust Sahakyan. Regardless of the fact that the Legal State is the order-taker of Sargsyan it will not be able to overcome the 5% threshold with its rating and the government will not be willing to endorse a party, which has gained a label of a “traitor” since the last 2008 presidential elections. The RPA has also decided to reduce the number of 16 seats of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. The ruling party thinks that regardless of its stable voters and supporters the ARF it was able to have so many seats in the parliament once again with the efforts of Kocharyan. According to certain information the incumbent government will try to cut in half the number of seats of the parties, who have endorsed Kocharyan or are from the latter’s support team. Of course, during this period the government will try to activate another party representing the Diaspora instead of the ARF. That is the reason why they have fragmented the Ramkavar and Henchak parties. But at the moment even fragmented these parties do not have the sufficient rating within the society to enter the parliament in the next elections. And as according to the unwritten rule the Diaspora should be represented in the parliament by all means and there is no decent substitute at the moment the ARF should have its seats in the next parliament but there will be fewer ARF MPs. Regardless of how profitable it is for the government to have an opposition represented by the Heritage faction in the next elections perhaps this party will be excluded. The fragmentation of this party of the last year, the cases of resignation of the party’s chairman Raffi Hovhannisian provided a very low rating for the Heritage party. And most importantly the government will not be able to ignore the non-parliamentary opposition this time – the Armenian National Congress. Independent from the attempts of the government to sketch the map of the next parliament, regardless of to what extent the ballots will be rigged the ANC should appear in the parliament by all means. Of course this time as well the government will try to register the results of the elections just like with the precedent of the mayoral race in Yerevan, that is provide fewer seats to the ANC than what they’d gain with the actual votes but they cannot ignore the presence of this force. Indeed this scenario is still preliminary. Unfortunately, during the formation of the parliament of Armenia the desires of the “outside forces” are also taken into account. The government should have forces to express the standpoints of Russia. There should be forces to support the approach the west. But regardless of this the opportunities of entering the parliament in 2012 may only have the abovementioned 4 political forces.