On May 5 all the parties will finally be silent. Will this silence help the constituents better orient who they’d like to vote for. Nonetheless, the most important thing, the answer of which we are trying to find out whether they should vote between bad and worse or boycott the elections. There is a slight nuance. In the case if boycotting you cannot express your feeling of contempt and detestation. First of all, no one will let you express your feelings and opinions and secondly someone will vote instead of you by all means. And in this case, as well, the party which the voters wouldn’t vote for, will win the race. We can be honest and mention that this time all the parties had equal opportunities to be on TV and express their viewpoints. This was obviously a step forward. In fact the external effects didn’t have much influence on the quality of the pre-election campaign. And let’s not mention the opposite either. What did the presence of children and juveniles during the RPA, PAP and Legal State rallies mean? There were well-staged rallies, which were broadly covered to legalize the so-called endorsement of these parties. And we don’t think the filming of the voting process and counting process will give the expected results. There were cases when the bigger the number of witnesses is the tougher is gets to prove the crime. The freshest precedent is the incident with Silva Hambardzumyan and Souren Khachatryan. Even a day before the elections, it is hard for the voters to figure out, who’s the opposition and who’s the government. Yesterday during the rally the ANC leader said, “Only the ANC, ARF and PAP are most interested in the conduct of free and fair elections.” It means that he classified the PAP as opposition and Heritage as government. A day before that, the President of Armenia, RPA leader Serzh Sargsyan stated in Kotayk marz that RPA endorses the leader of the PAP Gagik Tsarukyan and that the latter is their “candidate.” Tsarukyan doesn’t make any statement to argue about this. The emphasized sympathy of the ANC to PAP allows the rest of the parties have doubts about the actual intentions of the ANC. Yesterday it was especially hilarious to read the statements of the then-loyalist of the ANC Suren Surenyants. In district 7 he endorses famous oligarch Samvel Alexanyan. The ANC blames the Heritage for selling their seats in the election commissions to the RPA. The Heritage considers the ANC a “mine” in the political field. The second President speaks about the unsuccessful economic policies and migration and blames the incumbent government and in the meantime forgets to at least mention that during his tenure the events of October 27, March 1 took place and the murder of Poghos Poghosyan. The Legal State bids to overcome the threshold. The impression is that our society has lost its abilities to think independently, judge and philosophize. That is the reason why they decide to migrate; we go join foreign but developed cultures. We go to countries where there is the rule of law and the relations of the state and the citizen are regulated based on the supremacy of the law. My colleagues write that the society also has a very big portion in this process of failure by accepting election bribes. But prior to taking bribes we allow ourselves do much more demeaning and degrading things for us. Let each of us ask themselves whether they are legal in their lives, work and routine. The well-known the doctor, who perhaps doesn’t take bribes but prescribes his patient a medicine, which he claims should be bought from the main pharmacy at 15,000 AMD when the same medicine costs 700 AMD in all other drug stores. Or we can speak about the cab driver, who charged me 1000 AMD to drive me and my children from Isahakyan street to Ponchikanots in the pouring rain; or the businessman, who in the morning forces his employees to vote for the governmental candidate and in the evening speaks about the importance of freedom and liberty; or the high-rank statesman, who knows that the governmental system is corrupt but acts indifferent in order not to lose his job; or the journalist, who perhaps doesn’t take bribes but gets paid orders to write this or the other article. We can also mention the literate and conscious people, who serve the oligarchs, are ready to name their bosses philosophers and political scientists for the sake of money in the envelope. We are not honest. So aren’t the political parties. We should note that the accusations of parties to each other were quite substantiated but we couldn’t help noticing that how alike they are to each other. The most accurate description was perhaps given by RPA leader Serzh Sargsyan – “Everybody is us!”
