“Serzh Sargsyan is wrong”
Leader of the NA "Heritage" faction Stepan Safaryan says Serzh Sargsyan's evaluations in response to Raffi Hovhannisian's open letter are not the evaluations that the leader of a political party, much less the majority should have given.
"Serzh Sargsyan is wrong when he says Raffi Hovhannisian made a statement. Raffi Hovhannisian made a public proposal to use administrative resources and rule out the use of the party's monopolies as public and state resources. We shouldn't present it as a statement aimed at discrediting someone's actions," Safaryan told "A1+" during a telephone conversation.
According to the MP, if there has been anyone that has discredited elections in Armenia, it was the governments of all times that "have not wished to reject that defective practice for decades".
According to the MP, the concerns expressed in the "Heritage" Party leader's open letter to Serzh Sargsyan are not just what the party affirms. He emphasized that the representatives of different international organizations have talked about the use of administrative resources and the absence of pluralism on television and radio during elections in Armenia.
"Sargsyan should be aware that the Venice Commission has established the need for separating the state and the party so that the ruling parties don't use administrative and other state resources," Safaryan mentioned.
According to him, Raffi Hovhannisian simply showed the steps that should be taken in accordance with the spirit and letter of the RA legislation. "If the Republican Party of Armenia truly wants to hold free and transparent elections without post-election clashes and the events like those that took place on March 1, it should eliminate the flaws," he mentioned.
According to Safaryan, the authorities' declarations on holding "good elections" are populist, and the response from the pro-government forces to the parliamentary opposition's constructive proposals give him grounds for that conviction.
