Pre-electoral processes remain centered around one single person in Armenia without prompting changes in the logic typically attributed to the former authorities, according to Larisa Alaverdyan, a former ombudsperson currently acting as the executive director of Against Legal Arbitrariness (a human rights NGO based in Yerevan).
“That creates new types of complications which we have to consider. [Electoral] platforms, unfortunately, will play almost no role,” she told Tert.am on Tuesday.
Alaverdyan expects the active electorate to be essentially driven by personal motives “without any interests in minutia.”
Asked why many accomplished political forces (such as the Heritage party or the Armenian National Congress) were excluded from the recent processes, she attributed the fact to very different goals and objective. “The ANC, with all its political – and to my mind very wrong – approaches ensures its full presence in very different forms – in the person of those who represent [Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s bloc] My Step and the Civil Contract party,” she noted.
As for the Heritage party’s increasingly passive stance on the pre-electoral developments, Alaverdyan, a former opposition MP of that political team, said they didn’t apparently manage to mobilize their potential or “do rebranding” after their leader Raffi Hovhannisyan’s defeat in the 2013 parliamentary election.
The former ombudsperson said she expects the outcome of the December 9 election to be “essentially heavy”. “The majority is going to be literally overwhelming to force the minority to be ready, in a way, to speak about patriotism and act in support of the [‘Velvet] Revolution’. That’s the picture we are going to have,” she added.