Senior HAK figures said the party’s deputy chairman, Levon Zurabian, will top their list of candidates for next June’s general elections if the party participates in them on its own.
“We are entering the pre-election struggle to form a broad-based alliance that will help us save our country from this rapid decline,” one of them, Aram Manukian, told a news conference.
“The current government has only a 10 percent approval rating, and it would be shameful not to defeat it in such a situation,” he said. “We are alarmed and concerned about the loss of our sovereignty. So our task is to restore Armenian statehood.”
Neither Manukian nor Zurabian named any parties with which the HAK could join forces in a bid to unseat Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian. They ruled out any alliances with former Presidents Robert Kocharian and Serzh Sarkisian who lead the two opposition blocs represented in the current Armenian parliament. Ter-Petrosian’s party holds no parliament seats, having fared poorly in the last elections held in 2021.
Zurabian confirmed that earlier this year the HAK held lengthy and fruitless election-related discussions with Arman Tatoyan, Armenia’s former human rights ombudsman who set up his own political group in October.
“Their political messages are big incomprehensible to me,” he said of Tatoyan’s Wings of Unity movement. “But I’m not portraying that as a rebuke or accusation. There might be some negotiations in the future. We’ll see. I don’t rule anyone out.”
“But I think there are more important forces with which it’s worth negotiating,” Zurabian added without elaborating.
Armenia - Former President Levon Ter-Petrosian (left) and businessman Samvel Karapetian.
He seemed open to the HAK’s cooperation with jailed Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetian’s Mer Dzevov (In Our Way) movement which is expected to be one of the ruling Civil Contract party’s main election challengers.
Karapetian’s nephew Narek, who coordinates the expanding movement’s activities, stated last week that none of the three ex-presidents should govern Armenia again. Zurabian said that statement “doesn’t apply to us anymore” because the HAK has officially made clear that Ter-Petrosian, who will turn 81 on January 9, will not be its top election candidate.
Ter-Petrosian, who had led Armenia to independence in 1991, is a vocal critic of Pashinian, having branded the latter as a “nation-destroying scourge” in the wake of Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 war with Azerbaijan. Earlier this year, he repeatedly denounced Pashinian’s attempts to depose Garegin II, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, prompting insults from the ruling party.
Ter-Petrosian’s political allies and Zurabian in particular have denounced Pashinian’s track record in even stronger terms. Zurabian said on Friday that “new disasters” will await Armenia if Pashinian is reelected again.