Epress.am News from Armenia
From a socialist’s standpoint, there’s an elementary process at work in Armenia today — the population is being fed less and less because the elite is devouring more, said Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun, or ARF-D) parliamentary faction leader Vahan Hovhannisyan in an interview with Russian news agency Regnum.
“And if societies around the world are veering left, in Armenia the motion is not right or left, but only downwards. In this respect, it’s not necessary to speak of the ‘leftism’ of Armenian society — the impoverishment of the population is taking place. This process might lead to a shift to the left of the masses, but it might [also] end in anarchism. And this danger is very real,” he explained.
Asked whether post-election developments in Russia have an affect on the Armenian electoral process, Hovhannisyan said they can, “but not in a positive sense.”
“Our elite doesn’t learn anything good; it only duplicates the negative. It says something like ‘If United Russia rigged 15–17% of its votes and did not achieve success, we must do the same but not allow for any mistakes.’ That is, the elite doesn’t think about about changing policy. Let’s not forget about the fact that in Russian society, the social strata is different from ours. Our opposition electorate is a poor population, while in Russia, they are educated, well-fed members of the middle class who know that the country will not last long on oil and gas,” he said.