Is Nikol Pashinyan a populist or not? This comes as a surprise, but no, he isn’t a populist. This is what ex-Ambassador of Armenia to the Vatican Mikayel Minasyan declared in his video posted on his Facebook page.
“There are two groups formed in Armenia. There is a group of people who didn’t live the good life in the past, but now live a great life at the expense of the people, and there is a group of people who lived neither well nor bad in the past, but now live very bad and are living and will live worse every week. Today we will talk about the first group,” he said.
According to Minasyan, the first group is headed by Nikol Pashinyan, his family and few close people who are benefiting from power and living at the expense of the people. “These people aren’t populists, just like Nikol Pashinyan isn’t a populist because he has violated the unwritten laws of populism. For example, ex-president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili was considered a populist. Right from the first day of his term of office, he said he would reject all the advantages that the former authorities had and would cut off all ties and not be like them. As for Nikol Pashinyan, he not only started using the whole package, but also added to that package right from the first day of taking over.
He didn’t even wait for his political opponent Serzh Sargsyan to leave the state mansions and entered the so-called mansions and started going live on Facebook to show that he was going to live there. Nikol Pashinyan spent $2,000,000 and repaired a mansion that, I assure you (I have been in that mansion for reasons known to everyone), didn’t need to be renovated. One of his three big dreams was to live better than the famous and wealthy businessman Gagik Tsarukyan because only the latter could allow himself to have the quality of life that Nikol Pashinyan has,” Mikayel Minasyan said, adding the following:
“Nikol Pashinyan purchased cars worth more than $600-700,000 for him and his family and personal security vehicles. I assure you there have not been so many personal security vehicles in the past 30 years in Armenia as there are for Nikol Pashinyan and his family. This has absolutely nothing to do with populism. A populist wouldn’t take his wife to travel to different sites around the world at the expense of the people and by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to visit La Scala in Milan or the St. Lazarus Island in Venice. Nikol Pashinyan spent a tremendous amount of money for nothing, managed to have a quarrel with the President of the Senate of Italy and declared that Mikayel Minasyan is hiding in the basement of the Vatican. The bonuses worth billions have nothing to do with populism. Nikol Pashinyan isn’t a populist. He is a state oligarch because he is living like an oligarch with the money of the State and the people,” he said.