ELECTIONS OR REFORMS?
ARMEN TSATOURYAN
Hayots Ashkhar Daily
Published on April 26, 2008
Armenia
Two incompatible solutions
To find a peaceful way out of the country’s current situation, two
different options are proposed.
If we immediately and unconditionally rule out the radical opposition’s
persistent claims for political instabilities and revolutions, which
might have an undermining impact on Armenia, it will become clear that
the entire mosaic of the possible solutions can be grouped and divided
into two parts.
First: Organizing parliamentary elections, thus enabling the radical
opposition to be fully involved in political processes, after the
streets protests following the 2008 presidential elections.
Second: Raising the quality and speeding up the paces of the reforms
planned previously. This will help gradually overcome the internal
polarization and mutual estrangement still existing in society.
The situation resulting from the 2008 presidential elections certainly
has its objective and subjective reasons, and overcoming the former
through organizing elections is impossible as it is related to a whole
entangled string of problems existing in the country’s political and
economic life. And the only way towards their solution is the
implementation of consistent reforms. The issue whether or not to
organize elections is, undoubtedly, of secondary importance in this
context.
In theory, the new parliamentary elections open certain prospects for
shifting the opposition from street to square and healing the political
arena. However, the whole problem is that Ter-Petrosyan’s political
team refused to participate in the parliamentary elections, and the
votes obtained by the other political factions found their reflection
in the Parliament, elected legitimately in May 2007.
So, is it worth organizing a `charity function’ for the opposition and
its leader, who received 20 percent of votes in the presidential
elections, just in order to shift them to the National Assembly?
The answer to this question lies behind the sharp internal political
confrontation following the presidential elections. Obviously,
Ter-Petrosyan’s team used the presidential elections just as a means or
tool for staging a scenario of a destabilized political situation.
Otherwise, if Ter-Petrosyan had really intended to hold victory in the
presidential elections, he would have participated in the process of
distributing parliamentary mandates in 2007, gained a seat in the
electoral commissions and only thereafter thought about higher
ambitions.
Therefore, instead of doing an accurate calculation of the existing
ratio of forces, the new parliamentary elections will mark the
beginning of a new scenario leading to the destabilization of the
country’s internal political situation.
The entangled string of the problems existing in the political and
economic life of the republic is impossible to overcome within a period
of 6 months or even 1 year. Whereas the new destabilization of the
internal political situation may delay the solution of the existing
problems for several decades. Therefore, the `charity’ proposed by
Ter-Petrosyan and his political team may become an evil deed for the
whole country.
The accomplished and tested `electoral prescription’ useful to
`democratic systems’ may lead to a more exacerbated form of the disease
of distrust in the electoral institutions and, instead of moving the
country forward, hamper its development. By the way, the same may
happen during the next regular parliamentary elections if the upcoming
reforms are slowed down or do not reach their goal.
The existing discrepancies between the issue of organizing new, fair
and transparent elections (which, in theory, is the right solution) and
the current situation may be overcome by way of implementing consistent
reforms in the course of the upcoming 3 years, till the next regular
parliamentary elections, and such reforms should create a new economic
and political situation in the country. In such conditions, the major
part of the objective reasons of the post-electoral political
confrontation will be overcome. Society will be able to give a new
meaning to what happened, and the political forces will manage to find
solutions to and prescriptions for the new situation.
rganizing regular or extraordinary elections is not the issue here; the
whole problem is how each one will use the 3-year interval between them.