‘I Treat Drinking as Normal’: PM Comes Clean on Whether He was Drunk While Making Speech

RA Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan’s grandfather advised never to make friends with people who don’t drink. The prime minister conveyed these words to reporters after the question and answer period in parliament on Wednesday.

Recall, a video (see below) of the PM making a speech Friday at a public event celebrating youth while seemingly drunk went viral in the Armenian blogosphere and social networking sites. Many questioned whether he was indeed drunk.

“That’s why I approach drinking as normal; second, real technical issues arose during that event. Our team, which had prepared the event, hadn’t taken into consideration that such a technical issue could arise, because the stage was directly in front of our seating area and all the equipment and speakers were far. So when I began to talk, the feedback was so strong and was echoing back to me that I simply couldn’t hear what sentences I was saying and that, of course, was a drawback our team didn’t anticipate. They hadn’t considered that there could be such a problem,” he explained.

 

Tigran Sargsyan said that never has such a thing happened in all his 22 years of making public political speeches — and this was one lesson he’s going to learn.

“To be honest, the commotion that resulted was incomprehensible to me. Thousands of people participated in that event, and I hadn’t gone alone to the event; there were hundreds present; if I was inebriated, all would see and there was nothing to hide. But now everyone’s saying so what, he was drinking, let him say he was drinking; but now those people who were with me and who saw that I wasn’t drunk — wouldn’t they say that the prime minister is lying? Reporters went and asked everyone in the world if I was or wasn’t drunk — [including] those people who were seated next to me. Regretfully, I wasn’t drunk,” he said.

Asked whether he was going to sue anyone for the technical problems, the PM said there’s no point in fishing for a conspiracy. He expressed a conviction that there’s no such plot and again assured that they will take into account the experience.