Photo by Wally Sarkeesian
By Wally Sarkeesian
The incredible man Nikol Pashinyan for last 30 day he walked and talked almost 120 KM from Gyumri to Capital Yerevan hold none stop rallies. He forced unpopular Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan to resign. He wants to reform the country free people from corrupt government, Nikol Pashinyan is a man who until recently was hardly known to anyone outside Armenia. He sees Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan’s resignation this week as an important first step toward reforming the country, and now he wants parliament to make him Armenia’s new leader in early May.
Pashinian has repeatedly stated during rallies it is what the people want, and until then, the protests will continue.
Back in March, Pashinian, who serves as leader of liberal opposition coalition Jelk (Way Out), which won just 7.7 percent of the vote in last year’s parliamentary elections, embarked on a long journey. Together with a handful of supporters,
Pashinyan’s long fight, He began his career as a journalist in the 1990s before transitioning into politics. He ran for parliament in 2007, but his party failed to win any seats.
He was at the right place and the right time, and got the ball rolling,
Unlike in Ukraine, the Armenian protests are organic not viewed as being connected to country’s relationship with Russia or the European Union. Armenia remains a close ally of Moscow and relies on it for protection,
But more deep-seated animosity toward the 63-year-old over his handling of the economy and corruption has been building for a decade, with almost one-third of the country’s 3 million people living below the official poverty level, according to the Asian Development Bank.
Its economy is hugely dependent on remissions from its far-flung diaspora in Russia, Western Europe, and the United States, as well as trade with Russia, more broadly.
Iran is also an important trading partner.
“Sarkisian wasn’t running Armenia like a country, he was running it like his own personal fiefdom,” Varazdat Mkrtchian, the 51-year-old commander of the Eagle 30 Battalion that fought in the four-day war in April 2016 in the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh, told RFE/RL in Yerevan.
“His people were doing fine, while the rest of us were being stretched more and more each year,” he added.