Tigran Sargsyan’s confession

In order to insure them from possible failures the government of Armenia has lately started to apply a new method. It can be conditionally called a method of trust.

What does this mean? The government is giving promises, presents substantiated projects and strategies and mentions what positive changes they can bring about. They also add that these reforms are necessary to make the society trust us. For example, the government plan starts with the paragraph of the bright future of Armenia. The following words are used – meaningful life, affordable education, poverty cut, etc. “Each of us should be confident that the future of their children will be better in their own home country,” reads the plan. And after all that we can read the following, “The trust to this vision will give us strength to make positive changes.

The trust to this vision will give us strength to create and develop by leaving a powerful fatherland for the generations to come.” Simply said, the state urges us to believe that everything will be great.

So this depends to what extent we believe that it’s going to be good. This is nothing new but the continuation of the slogan – “let’s believe to change.” And during the TV show on Armenia TV “Evolution” Premier TIgran Sargsyan once again reiterated this thesis. He confessed that there is lack of trust. Specifically, to the question whether the society trusts the government Tigran Sargsyan said no. He also added that they need more trust in order to implement serious reforms. This is a very noteworthy idea, which can also be very ambiguous.

On the one hand, he is right in order to do serious reforms it is necessary to have the support of the society. On the other hand, serious reforms are needed to restore the people’s trust. In Tigran Sargsyan’s case, this task is even tougher because he has had a whole 5 years to build this trust. It means that with his policies he should have ensured that there was no such need to speak about the restoration of trust.

But the most noteworthy thing is to look at this matter from the other side. As a matter of fact, Tigran Sargsyan has made a very serious confession by stating that. But let’s go one by one. Thus, the restoration of trust is not a very abstract idea and in the case of government it has concrete measuring mechanisms. And that mechanism is the number of votes received during elections. RPA’s slogan was “let’s believe to change.”

According to CEC’s official results the society trusted the government and let them change. During the presidential elections of this year the incumbent president was re-elected with 58% of votes and after that Yerevan’s mayor Taron Margaryan received 55% of the ballots. This is nothing but the vote of trust. In any civilized country the government which receives 50% of votes considers itself well-trusted by the society.

It means that the Premier thinks that the society doesn’t trust them. It means that either their ballots were stolen or they are trying to persuade us that the Armenian citizens have voted for people, who they don’t trust. If there is the third option we would love to learn about that as well.

By Babken Tunyan