In his February 7 address to the National Assembly, Nikol Pashinyan demonstrated an authoritarian leader’s behavior, voicing anti-democratic theses posing threats to the constitutional order, Arthur Martirosyan, an expert in negotiation affairs (CMPartners, Cambridge, United States), said Tuesday, commenting on the prime minister’s speech at the parliament’s special session.
“He voiced several theses in his speech not conforming to the democratic norms. The most calamitous among them is the Bolshevik-style or, more precisely, the Stalin-style thesis that ‘The one who seats between two chairs will betray the revolution’ or ‘The one who isn’t with us is against us’. That, certainly, leads to more dividing lines nor corresponding to the principles earlier proclaimed by them in either style or content. That’s a statement of a potentially authoritarian leader,” he told Tert.am in an interview, predicting chances of a return to first President Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s era.
The expert also warned of the situation in Armenia after the constitutional referendum, particularly the fact that the country will be de-facto without a Constitutional Court for a certain time. “So if certain people wish to dispute the election outcome after the referendum, there will be practically no place for them to go in order to do that.
”To the best of my understanding, the Constitutional Court is the responsible body under the Constitution of Armenia. Moreover, I do not have any illusions at all that the ruling party will do everything possible not to have a majority of judges in the new Constitutional Court. I do not believe in fairytales that it isn’t possible in situations when there is oversight by two other [branches of] power. We remember that politics is the art of the possible. And the system which is being created now totally permits that. And that actually goes unnoticed by external observers not familiar with the internal cuisine,” Martirosyan said.