“Would
you like to eat?” he asked, beckoning to a table scattered with plastic
cartons holding takeout pork kebabs wrapped in paperlike bread, as well
as tomato and cucumber salad. “This kind of lunch is the usual for us
for the past month; we have not gotten back to civilized ways.”
If
whirlwind events of the past month are any guide, Armenia might never
get back to its old ways, civilized or not. On Tuesday, Mr. Pashinyan
became Armenia’s interim prime minister, when a Parliament dominated by
his political foes elected him by a 59-to-42 vote.
After
vowing to remake the country’s political and economic systems, Mr.
Pashinyan told a cheering throng in the central Republic Square in
Yerevan, the capital, that, “Your victory is not that I was elected as
prime minister of Armenia; your victory is that you decided who should
be prime minister of Armenia.”
