Based on Saturday’s decree of the President, the new government held its first session and indeed ratified its 2012-2017 plan, which will tomorrow be submitted to the NA in the pathos of a few criticizing statements. Thus, we may say that, by doing this, the presidential campaign kicked off. And of course, this is not official yet and is mostly taking place within the government. This is clearly seen in yesterday’s speech of the Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan during the government session. “In 2012, the priority for our Government is to provide a 7 percent economic growth. Economic growth is not an end in itself; our goal is to lay a solid foundation for a sustainable and constant development, persistent reduction and a total eradication of poverty in the visible future. This will be the first indicator of your work. As stipulated by the Constitution, we have to come back to the issue of forming government after the Presidential elections in 2013. At that very time, the statistical service will have summarized the economic situation of the previous year, and we will have results of the Government’s activities for 2012 and the previous five years. Then, we will have another opportunity to reassess the ongoing programs and the quality of the conducted works,” stated Serzh Sargsyan. It means that Sargsyan tells the members of the government in a direct way that the ones who work well now will continue holding their hosts after the presidential race as well. On the one hand, this message may be a reason for concern for the old and new ministers. On the other hand, they can be quite calm because the chair of the Armenian Statistics Service is also a government member and it wouldn’t be a bog challenges to “overcome” the 7% growth. Back in the day, this service would record dual-digit growths to gratify this expectation.
