NEW FORCE, NEW OPPOSITION
Hakob Badalyan

Lragir.am
13/01/10

The regular election rigged in Armenia with apparent cynicism and the
calm attitude of the Armenian National Congress towards it when they
stated after the election that they had never believed Nikol Pashinyan
would have won and the election was illegal, shows the need to think
about a new opposition or force in Armenia. Discussions on this topic
activated, mainly on the level of experts’ opinions.

All this has quite objective grounds. The current opposition is
apparent to have lost its trust within a tangible part of the
society due to its strategic mistakes and errors. In addition, the
society did not lose its trust towards the opposition because of the
reason that the latter is not making a revolution or is not holding
rallies. The real reason for the loss is that during time the words
of the opposition assimilated to those of the government and the
society stopped noticing the difference between the opposition and
the government.

While, in order to succeed in struggle with the Armenian government,
the latter does not need to be radically criticized but the society
is needed to be shown concrete differences between the opposition and
the government. When the current opposition was able to fulfill this
task, it was the dictator of the situation. As soon as the opposition
started looking for success within geopolitical traps, the difference
between the opposition and the government disappeared on this plane
and the opposition had only to wait for the government to collapse
or to become tolerant.

Conversations on the need of a new force are natural to be augmented
against this background which regularly activate in Armenia when
presence of a serious amount of distrust between the society and
the opposition becomes evident. Do the conversations on the need of
a new force contain practicality? From this point, we have to state
that during the history of the newly-independent Armenia every time
such conversations appeared, they have never contained practicality.

The reason of course is not that the creation of a new force was
equally dangerous for the opposition and the government of a certain
period of the Armenian history and they tried to eliminate it just
from the cradle which will surely happen now if such a force is
noticed. The point is that the conversations on the creation of a new
force in Armenia have always been based on the propaganda axis of the
distraction of the current forces. In other words, the conversations
on the creation of a new force are based on expectations: the current
forces are expected to collapse for the need to create a new force
to be voiced again.

In other words, the observations and discussions on a new force are
offered to the public according to the logic of the old forces: x
and y collapsed, the society remained without a political force, so
it is right time to create a new one. This is already an artificial
ground for the creation of a new force. The point is that politics
is a natural process. If someone has something to say and to do,
it says and does it independently from what the "old" forces of the
same process say or do. In addition, it does not base its words and
actions on the failures of the "old" forces but exceptionally on its
own values. If the society is bored with the "old" forces and does
not believe them any longer, it will follow the new force and will
believe it. Otherwise, they will have to "reign over ruins" which
is the dream of almost all the political forces of Armenia as they
can determine their mistakes by the ruins which left the previous
governor. We are witnessing now what comes out of all this when say
successes are determined by new thinking, and failures are reasoned
by the mistakes of previous years.