Mikayel Zolyan
On the evening of 23 April, Armenia celebrated the
resignation of Serzh Sargsyan, the man who had ruled Armenia for ten
years as president — and for a week as prime-minister. Strangers hugged
and congratulated one another, cars honked their horns, and shops ran
out of champagne. Everybody celebrated in their own way: some put tables
in the streets and marked the occasion traditionally, with vodka and a
barbecue, while others danced to Berlin-style techno music in bars.
Still, the happiness seemed universal.
Today, on 25
April, the protesters are back on the streets. As one of the protesters
said to Radio Liberty correspondent on the station’s live feed: “We have
overthrown the tsar, now we need to overthrow tsarism.” Formally, the
protests have a new target — acting prime-minister Karen Karapetyan, who
represents the (still) ruling Republican Party, which at least at the
time of writing, possessed the majority in Armenia’s parliament.
However, it is unlikely that Armenia’s
opposition, led by charismatic former journalist Nikol Pashinyan, will
stop halfway. Pashinyan’s supporters are demanding to the formation of a
provisional government under the leadership of a “people’s candidate”
(it is obvious that they mean Pashinyan). They argue that only a
provisional government is able to ensure that the elections are free and
fair and the will of the people is respected. Pashinyan is increasingly
acting like the future head of Armenia’s executive branch.
On
the evening of 24 April, he held a press conference that was attended
by international press, met with ambassadors, and is making statements
on both internal and foreign policy. Thus, in the press conference
Pashinyan was careful to stress that the movement he represents was
focused only on internal affairs, and that if he came to power there
would be no major changes in Armenia’s foreign policy, whether in
relations with Russia, EU or USA. Several political forces have already
declared their support for Pashinyan, including those that used to play
role of the “systemic opposition”.
Even if a small number of Republican members of parliament defect to
Pashinyan, he will have enough votes to form the government. The
Republican Party will be able to withstand this pressure and keep its
hold on power for some time, but it is obvious that the political system
so carefully constructed by Sargsyan will not outlive its creator for
long. The protesters have already reframed their main slogan from “Reject Serzh” to “Reject HHK” (HHK is the name of the Republican Party in Armenian).
None
of this seemed even remotely possible even a month ago. The success of
the protest movement has been a surprise not only to analysts, but even
its leaders. Arguably, when the protests were starting, the most the
protest leaders could have hoped for was to unify the opposition and
complicated the transition to parliamentary republic, thus harming the
legitimacy of Serzh Sargsyan. But as often happens in authoritarian
regimes, when the protests passed a certain threshold, the government
was no longer able to stop them.
One of the reasons why
these protests have been so successful lies in the broad coalition that
Pashinyan and his team have been able to build. Apparently, Sargsyan and
his plans to remain in power indefinitely were so unpopular with the
majority of Armenians that the protests united people across the
political spectrum — people from different social classes and with
different lifestyles. On the days of the protests, one could see bearded
hipsters and “rabiz” guys in tracksuits
(the Armenian version of “gopnik” subculture), “glamorous chicks” and
short-haired feminists, people on old Volkswagens and people in Mercedes
jeeps, all taking part in the same protest actions. At the same time,
the most active force of the protests were the youth, university and
even high school students.
In addition, this was also probably the most gender-balanced protest in Armenia
so far. While usually protests in Armenia are dominated by angry young
men (or depressed old men), this time it was different: there were
almost as many women on the streets as men, and at certain points the
women even outnumbered men (especially given that men were more likely
to be detained or beaten up by the police). The protesters were creative
and technically savvy and at the same time less prone to violence than
had been the case in the previous protests, which meant that for the
police it was more difficult to justify the violent repression.
The
protests have also been decentralised: Pashinyan and other protest
leaders acted as initiators and coordinators of the protests, but unlike
the previous protests the opposition did not have a clear hierarchical
structure. That is why, when on 22 April Nikol Pashinyan and other
leaders were arrested,
the arrest had the opposite effect of what was intended. The government
most likely hoped that the arrest of Pashinyan would have on the
movement the same effect that the detention of Levon Ter-Petrosyan during
the March 2008 protests
that accompanied Sargsyan’s rise to power. According to this scenario,
after the protest leader’s arrest, protests would lose leadership and
slide into chaos and violence, justifying state repression.
However,
things played out very differently this time. After some initial shock,
supporters of the movement started going out to the streets. Improvised
protests started all over Armenia. In the evening, the largest rally
throughout the protest took place in Yerevan’s Republic Square. It was
probably then that the ruling elite realised that things were over. It
was obvious that only repression on a massive scale could stop the
protests at that point, but Sargsyan had neither the international nor
internal support for such a move. And so, on 23 April, Sargsyan issued a statement that contained words that immediately became legendary: “Pashinyan was right, I was wrong.”
Whether
Karen Karapetyan will make a similar statement to Sargsyan’s is up to the
people on Armenia's streets — and more specifically, their numbers.
"Open Democracy," April 25, 2018 (www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/mikayel-zolyan/armenia-s-permanent-revolution-why-do-protests-continue-in-yerevan).
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