YEREVAN. – At the moment, a deep reassessment process is taking place in Armenia, and that process is connected with state order-individual correlations; today we face, we see relations between the individual and the state order. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated this during Friday’s debates on the 2019 state budget performance report, at the joint sitting of the standing committees of the National Assembly.

"We are faced with an important question: How do we perceive the state?" Pashinyan asked, and added: "Now, as a result of this [COVID-19] epidemic, we need to reevaluate relations between the individual and the state order, to reevaluate our attitude towards discipline and our civic responsibilities."

He stressed that Armenia had an old perception of the state budget, and a new perception should be formed. "The new perception of the budget should be that the budget is our shared wallet which we form together to meet our shared needs,” Pashinyan explained. “No matter how historic the year 2019 was in terms of budget, we have not collected the potential that actually exists. According to various calculations, there is a huge shadow economy in Armenia. There are even estimates that the potential of the budget could be more—up to 400 billion drams.

In fact, I believe that, of course, administration, discipline is very important. But I want to emphasize my personal approach that discipline should not be the result of forcible coercion (…), but psychologically, discipline for the statal people should be an _expression_ of the will of having a state of citizens,” the Prime Minister concluded.