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Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said that his Civil Contract ruling party’s mission is the signing and ratification of the initialed peace agreement with Azerbaijan.
“We cannot leave the people’s government on the street. The mandate given to us by the people must be fulfilled to the end: the Peace Agreement must be signed and ratified, and we will consider our mission accomplished,” Pashinyan said at a press conference.
The Prime Minister also responded to a journalist’s question about whether the government is concerned that Armenia could turn from a democratic state into an authoritarian state.
“If any democracy does not have concerns about becoming authoritarian, the likelihood of those concerns becoming reality is greater. Of course, we have concerns. We believe that it is also necessary to move beyond this current-former logic. By the way, people accuse us, saying that if justice had been carried out against [ex-president] Robert Kocharyan and [Gagik] Tsarukyan until now, this situation would not have occurred. We also ask ourselves within the party: why is a new political force not emerging in parliament, one that is new in its nature and ideology? And should we do something new about that or not? If we do something new, we may, unintentionally, fall into the field of ‘clients,’ when there was the government, the opposition, and the ‘government’s client opposition.’ But we do not have such resources and are ideologically incompatible [with this],” Nikol Pashinyan said.
Pashinyan added that major opposition political forces have monopolized the political field, including through financial resources, and are leaving no room for the formation of other political forces.