Will the public be ready not to be manipulated? The second President of Armenia Kocharyan wondered in an interview with three Armenian TV channels talking about possible internal political developments and commenting on the observation that there is a lot of discussion that a change in the political situation in Armenia is possible only in case of force majeure.

“Is the 5-10% economic downturn a force majeure or not, and if the government has made many promises and has not fulfilled any of them, is it a political force majeure or not?” he wondered. “It is one thing that people do not adequately assess the situation in the case of euphoria, and another thing when people try to assess more coldly what this government has done for us, for our people...Where is the rapid economic growth? Even before the pandemic, the budget envisaged about 5% economic growth. Is that rapid growth?”

The second president reminded that the current authorities have repeatedly spoken about the change in the structure of the economy, promised the development of higher value-added sectors, while we see the exact opposite. “The subsoil has never been exploited in Armenia with such intensity, today we have merciless use of the subsoil. They talked about the inclusive economy, it was one of the main these....they talked about the fight against monopolies, and the monopolies only increased. Small and medium-sized businesses are in free fall, they are closing down. The fight against the epidemic has simply failed. We talked about the fight against corruption, it turned out that the form of corruption has simply changed, it turned out that you do not need to think of complicated schemes to steal from the budget, you can just spend the budget in the form of a very quiet reward. They say they have brought back 100 million dollars, I read the budget and in the line where it should be seen, it simply does not exist, it is several billion drams, no other incomes can be seen.  Maybe they brought it back, but not to the budget, I don't know where they brought it.”

According to Robert Kocharyan, the system of state service has simply been zeroed.

“The government and the ruling power have not realized that they need a very serious and strong opposition, and the weaker that opposition, the more ineffective they will be. The country needs a strong opposition today.“