Raffi Elliott
As with the other 11 registered parties
in the upcoming snap elections slated for December 9, the Republican
Party of Armenia (RPA) launched its campaign this week by unveiling a
number of billboards across the country. The RPA had recently announced
its intention to run after sitting out the Yerevan Municipal poll. The
vote takes place seven months after President Serzh Sargsyan was ousted
from his newly acquired post of Prime Minister by the Velvet Revolution.
Most party ads have been featuring
variations of a standard design displaying the candidate’s face and
party logo capped with a slogan. The RPA’s posters are no different, but
they have generated some controversy among Armenia’s citizens.
Sources say even the choice of colors
on the posters is not random. High-ranking RPA official, Armen
Ashotyan, says the palette was a reference to controversial comments
made by then-mayoral candidate and Pashinyan ally, Hayk Marukyan, who
described the vote as a struggle between light versus darkness.
The Republican party HQ has released seven variations of these posters.
The campaign includes slogans like “If you’re concerned about border
security, vote for #1” (#1 being the Republican Party’s placement on the
ballot).
Messages like “If you are concerned
about losing your job, vote #1” have garnered particular scorn for their
perceived cynicism. “Almost two decades of Republican Party rule failed
to generate any significant job creation in Armenia,” one voter, who
preferred to remain anonymous, told the Weekly, “and here they are
promising to be the party of economic prosperity and political
security.”
On
social media, Armenian citizens responded with parodies of the
Republicans’ tactic. One, which uses the same basic design and font type
with a slight variation on the message, reads, “If you have
memory-loss, vote Republican,” referencing the ironic fact that the RPA
slogans are denouncing the policies of a seven-month old government,
while having failed to tackle the very same issues during their 20-year
long majority in Parliament . Another depicts a scantily clad phone-sex
operator with the slogan, in the same font as the Republican Party
adverts: “If you’re feeling lonely, call Kara.”
One viral video superimposed the
audio from the Republican Party’s actual campaign
advertisement—expressing doubt about the new government’s ability to
maintain growth, prosperity and security—with images of the Republicans
failing at those very things.
Living
up to the time-honored Armenian tradition of capitalizing on trends for
commercial purposes, a Thai massage salon in Yerevan took inspiration
from the RPA’s campaign aesthetic for a new ad telling customers: “If
you are concerned about your nervous system, choose the hot rock
massage.”
Some of the RPA’s posters, however,
reveal a broader strategy. In the months since losing their
parliamentary majority, Republicans have stated their intention to
reinvent themselves into a new opposition force, structured around
populist and conservative principles. The party’s electoral platform
lays out the following two critical principles for its
‘national-conservative’ doctrine: 1) the importance of the Armenian
Apostolic Church and 2) that traditional families form the core of
Armenian society. The platform also stresses the importance of former
Defense Minister Vigen Sargsyan’s “Nation-Army” concept. This strategy
has been implemented over the last two months, in the controversy
over a planned Christian LGBT event in Yerevan and the attempts to
table several bills designed to pigeonhole Prime Minister Nikol
Pashinyan as a threat to Armenia’s national security as well as
traditional values. This conservative approach is now embodied in a
poster that reads: “If you’re concerned about preserving traditional
values, vote Republican.”
Though this campaign may seem
blissfully sardonic to many Armenian voters, the message is resonating
with some. One voter who spoke to the Weekly on the condition of
anonymity, remarked, “It’s true that the Republicans made a lot of
mistakes during their term, but the mistakes committed by the Pashinyan
government in the last 7 months are incalculably worse.” They added
“Pashinyan’s distasteful decorum has given me more respect for
once-unloved RPA.”
"The Armenian Weekly," November 28, 2018
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