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The Marriage of Heritage Party and Free Democrats: Opinion

The Heritage Party and the Free Democrats party “got married” independent of the will of the Heritage Party, believes political analyst Armen Badalyan, referring to the two parties’ joint list of parliamentary candidates under the proportional system made public on Sunday.

According to Badalyan, there’s only one reason why the two opposition parties didn’t form an alliance, but rather choose to enter the parliamentary race on a joint list: as an alliance, the parties would be forced to overcome the 7% threshold while running in the elections on a joint list will enable them to overcome a 5% threshold in order to secure parliamentary seats.

The final list, according to the analyst, is the Free Democrats party under the Heritage Party’s name and it’s quite natural that active Heritage Party members are dissatisfied with the list.

“What drew attention the most in the Heritage Party was its [parliamentary] faction — and not its entire faction, but 4–5 people. And from those MPs, Larisa Alaverdyan and Armen Martirosyan aren’t even in the top 10 on the list,” he said, considering such a list to be illogical.

According to him, the Free Democrats won’t gain much advantage out of the proportional list either.

“The Free Democrats is as virtual party, which we see only in the internet and in the press. The party wants to enter parliament through the Heritage Party,” he surmised.