YEREVAN. – The Armenian authorities will not be able to rig the results of the upcoming parliamentary elections, even if they want to. Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated this while answering the MPs' questions at Monday’s special sitting of the National Assembly, during the latter’s debates on the matter of electing a new prime minister of Armenia.
According to him, the people in Armenia are endowed with power, and now everyone in the society realizes that. "First of all, the government itself realizes that. I used to say, ‘End to velvet in the revolution.’ But a system of governance was created in the country that I could not fulfill my [aforesaid] statement. Now everything is decided by the laws and the public administration system," Pashinyan said.
As per the acting premier, the effective system of counterbalancing in Armenia manifested itself also during the crisis—after the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) war last fall—, enabling avoiding not only a civil war but also mass clashes in Armenia, albeit the government was being affronted during this time. "If you take a broader look, the country managed to maintain macroeconomic stability, although opponents had predicted both economic collapse and famine [in the country]," Pashinyan recalled.
He added that Armenia’s politics shall be freed from the domination of certain individuals, as the Armenian authorities have adopted the respective amendments to the Law on Political Parties.
According to Pashinyan, the meaning of these reforms is but one: to show that the supreme power in Armenia belongs to its people.
"And now you can hardly find a person [in Armenia] who believes that nothing depends on his vote, and on the elections, in general. And even if we try to get everything back to old, we will not be able to do it; the [Armenian] society will simply not allow us to do that," the acting prime minister emphasized.
