The closer the election day comes, the more names are announced for including in the lists under majoritarian system of elections. From time to time the people that were hoping that oligarchs and others would not appear in the new parliament are being disappointed and now they are skeptical about the announcements if the authorities that the new parliament will have a better quality.
The one that made such announcement was the RPA, and they specifically mentioned in their announcement that their proportional lists would be clean, but not the majoritarian one. Why did they made such announcement and fail? Why did they need this? The international community is criticizing the authorities and telling them that the reasons of all problems in Armenia is the fact that the government and business are interconnected, thus these two things must be separated. Now, the authorities are imitating that they agree with it, thus they will keep the businesses far from their pre-election lists, but indeed not the parliament. Generally it is no news that the interconnection of the business environment and politics is creating many problems. Those people who have businesses and are in the government usually use their administrative resources to advance their businesses and/or press down their competitors. Accordingly, this conflict of interests does not let officials make fair and independent, unbiased decisions. It seems not to be fair to blame MPs in this because they don’t have real power over the administrative resources. Of course they may support bills in the parliament that are protecting their own businesses. However, the reality in Armenia is that MPs usually don’t do it. Our MPs are not that smart or brave to go against the authorities act jointly. There are people who say that businessmen become MP to protect their businesses, i.e. they need the MP’s mandate to have personal immunity and protect their businesses. This is exaggerated because the experience shows that if the authorities want to punish someone, the mandate does not help. One the other hand, there are successful businessmen who do well and are protected without a mandate. This means that the parliamentary mandate in fact does not give anything to MPs. The only privilege is definitely the fact that being MP is “prestigious”. In other words, the National Assembly has become something like an “elite club”, where businessmen establish themselves and find friends, partners, etc. Is this the only thing that makes businessmen spend a lot of money, take part in campaigns, be criticized and slammed only for the sake of becoming a member of the parliament? Of course, no. No one obligates them to become MP. The only thing that obligates them to become MP is the environment they are living in. Businessmen are needed for the purpose of strengthening the power through majoritarian system of elections and having majority in the parliament. Nobody asks them if they want, neither they can give up and go aside because neutrality is considered to be a riot.
In fact the reality is that the authorities are not trying to separate the business from the power as they have committed, but they are doing the vice versa. Businessmen are the most vulnerable people in the society because they have no independence. The richer a businessman is, the more vulnerable he is.
In the recent times there are even discussions that in Armenia everyone has some property, starting from teachers, who organize private classes at home, ending up with high rank officials. Maybe such rumors have been initiated from a certain source. On the one hand, this come to prove that it is impossible to live with the salary only and officials have either businesses, illegal incomes (bribe) or relative who send money to them from other countries. In fact these are just justifications because it does not matter if a businessman is registered as the owner or an employee in his business, he is the one who makes decisions. The culture of corporative management is not common in the country, thus they are making decisions solely. Formally, most of them register their businesses in the names of their relatives, thus the law cannot prohibit them be nominated for elections. Thus, no one can control how these families are regulating their businesses in evenings from home.
In 2009 the government made this process more difficult and announced about adoption of a system of discovering conflicts of interests. This means a mechanism, which is to discover the interests of MPs, officials and others involved in the government and not allow them do business while they occupy state positions. The initiative brought a number of amendments in different laws. In May 2009 during a session of the government Prime-Minister Tigran Sargsyan said, “We are doing a very serious thing by adopting this law because we are adopting an institute for discovering conflicts of interests. This means that this law is establishing specific mechanisms not allowing state officials be involved in business through discovering their interests, their connection with third parties. Accordingly, the society has an opportunity to control this Constitutional norm and this law works.”
At that time many people did not think this initiative was serious. Armenia is such a small country that everyone knows everything about the others and there is no need to discover anything. Three years have passed since that time. During this time they have discovered one and very important thing: it is very difficult to find anyone who does not have a business. In other words, everyone is businessman in Armenia. In such environment it is not realistic to separate the business from the government.