“Hayots Ashkhar” calls into question the political prospects of the opposition’s most recent initiative to call a special meeting of parliament to discuss amendments to election laws. “Those who initiated this special meeting hardly have any illusions themselves that the proposed changes can be adopted. A likely scenario is that the parliament majority will simply vote against them… Then what is this initiative all about? The thing is that one of the main purposes of the initiative is to achieve this predictable rejection, in other words, to fixate that, on which the main emphasis will be made in the process,” the paper suggests
“Zhamanak” criticizes President Serzh Sarkisian for the economic policies that he has pursued during his time in office which it says have even more widened the social polarization in the country. The daily writes: “Elites have become even richer, preserving and even enhancing their monopolistic and oligopolistic positions, while ordinary people have become even poorer. No one is interested anymore in explanations citing the global economic crisis as the main cause. Governments are there to eliminate the consequences of crises and if they are unable to do that, they must go. The Sarkisian government won’t go. All it does is creating good prerequisites for the rehabilitation of the former president, Robert Kocharian.”
In an interview with “Aravot” Hanrapetutyun party leader Aram Sargsian reacts to the recent statement by Kocharian in which the ex-leader backed the idea of Armenia scrapping parliamentary elections in single-member constituencies. He says he does not remember Kocharian ever supporting that before. “If the Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK) and Kocharian speak about feudalization of single-member constituencies, let them first see the beam in their our eyes. When BHK leader Gagik Tsarukian speaks about people who had only a hundred bucks when they entered politics – and if he means Kocharian – I say, damn, he must be right: Kocharian was the “poorest” of all candidates running for president in 2003. Today he is the wealthiest man in Armenia… And these people still think they have the right to give advice?”
“Haykakan Zhamanak” suggests that the much-publicized program called “Armenian Cheese” has “spectacularly failed” among lots of other similar initiatives launched in Armenia in the last few years: “You must remember the grandiose plans for the Armenian World, for turning Jermuk, Gyumri, Dilijan into health and tourism, hi-tech and financial centers of the region and so on so forth. Unlike the other failed programs, however, “Armenian Cheese” has figures clearly demonstrating this failure. The government and cheese makers made hundreds of millions of drams’ worth of investment in a program only to get some 25 tons of cheese exported in the end. In order to get an idea of how little it is, we should mention that annually Armenia produces about 17,000 tons. So, after all that show, only two truckloads of cheese have been exported.”
(Tigran Avetisian)