Epress.am News from Armenia
The Heritage Party welcomes statements made yesterday by the Armenian National Congress and Free Democrats party in which they express their support for the proposal by Heritage Party and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) to eliminate the majority electoral system in the upcoming parliamentary elections, head of the Heritage Party parliamentary faction Stepan (Styopa) Safaryan told Epress.am, explaining why his party is opposed to the majority system.
“The majority electoral system has brought more flaws to our political system. If 41 seats are majority [out of a total of 131 seats] and out of this 41, in parliament today only 1–2 deputies participate in political debates, this means that parliament by at least one-third is a non-political body,” he said.
The MP noted that there is an option in which the majority system can be preserved, but it’s not applicable in today’s reality.
“If politicians were elected in a majority system, naturally no one would say, well, get rid of that system, but, unfortunately, Armenia’s reality, for already the fourth convocation, shows that it’s simply become a way for apolitical people, businessmen to get into parliament — moreover, an opportunity to criminalize the elections,” he said.
Safaryan is sure that abolishing the majority electoral system will increase political entities’ accountability for those those individuals entering parliament.
“When we, referring to many of them, say that they’re [pro–ruling coalition], they say, no, they’re independent, but we never saw that independence, because they vote quite unanimously with the administration, and consequently, if that creates a window to merging business and politics to an even greater extent, well then this system has to be excluded,” he said.
In Safaryan’s view, this change in the electoral system will allow the creation of a political body where there are political people, and not people who can only inquire in the corridors, in the best case scenario, about this or that issue with this or that village.
Updated 4:03 pm, same day for clarity.