The Armenian Revolutionary Federation Supreme Assembly of Armenia on Sunday unanimously decided that the party will take part in snap parliamentary elections, scheduled for December.
The 22nd extraordinary Supreme Assembly of Armenia convened on Friday in Aghveran, Armenia to prepare for the party’s upcoming World Congress—the highest administrative body of the ARF.
While assessing the upcoming straggles and activities of the party for the upcoming four years. the Assembly also announced that the party would field candidates in the parliamentary elections.
According to an announcement issued on Sunday, the Assembly concluded that without “complete amendments to the [Armenia’s] electoral code, it would be unacceptable to hold snap parliamentary elections this upcoming December.”
The Assembly also expressed its concern about the lack of guarantees in place for holding free, fair and transparent elections as have been imbedded in the government’s program.
The Assembly also added the rejecting the negative events and incidents do not “imply a guaranteed future.”
The ARF fielded its slate of candidates in last month’s Yerevan City Council elections and received approximately 1.6 percent of the votes.
Last week representatives of the party met with Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and pledged that the ARF would not nominate its own candidate for the prime minister when parliament convenes to begin the process to hold snap parliamentary elections.
The ARF needs to come to terms that at the moment, the citizens of Armenia do not trust them or what they stand for as a party. It’s a sad reality, but it is reality, Yerevan municipal elections proved it, national elections won’t be any different. In the past 6 months, the ARF “switched sides” 4 times, the populace noticed and now the ARF is feeling the reverberations if its own party actions. Trying to save parliamentary seats and blocking the sweeping changes the snap elections will bring is only making the party look even more foolish, selfish, and petty. They need spend the next 5 to 10 years cleaning house and building the party’s image again in a trustworthy fashion.
This whole “constitutional changes for fair elections” nonsense is simply a last ditch effort to block the snap elections and salvage their political presence. The election system in Armenia is fine, it’s the people that got elected the past 15 years that’s the problem.