Presidential candidate Armen Sarkissian highlights parallel development of all economy branches

YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 26, ARMENPRESS. Presidential candidate Armen Sarkissian attaches importance to the simultaneous development of all branches for the development of Armenia’s economy.

Asked in an interview by Public TV about the three main working fronts of his, from where the citizens of Armenia can expect real results, Armen Sarkissian emphasized that he doesn’t like to be limited by solely one, two or three important activity factors.

“If we observe the vision of Armenia’s economy, then we can’t say that the IT branch is the most important one for the Armenian economy. Someone can say the agriculture sector is, someone else can say it is tourism, or the banking sector. The specificity of the 21st century is that the society, the state can develop very rapidly if all branches are developing in a parallel manner. This is called parallel operation in mathematics, because during parallel processes any step definitely has its synergy and is useful for other directions, therefore the development process of all takes place parallel and with greater productivity and speed, rather if the processes were to be implemented successively,” Sarkissian said.

Asked how he plans to reach national dialogue, which he has mentioned several times before, Armen Sarkissian emphasized that the most important task in this issue is overcoming intolerance, which “is the very simple human flaw”.

“Intolerance leads to the division of the society, the political elite, absence of dialogue, absence of exchange of ideas and eventually leads to everything becoming black and white in the society. If it is us, it is white, if it’s not us, it’s black. And if we put this black and white next to each other we get a grey picture, when the reality is multicolored,” he said.

Sarkissian says the way to eliminate the grey picture is simple dialogue, to show that dialogue is the culture of speaking or listening, agreeing or disagreeing, a culture of debating, reaching consensus or even not reaching it.

“For us, the most important is the culture of expressing one’s own opinion. People must be sure that he is entitled to it, not only having their own opinion, but also expressing it,” he said.

Earlier in January Armen Sarkissian, Armenia’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom, was offered by incumbent President Serzh Sargsyan, who also serves as President of the country’s ruling Republican Party, to be the party’s candidate for the upcoming presidential elections. Sarkissian initially requested a brief period of time for pondering the offer, and in the meanwhile held various meetings with political parties, civil society representatives, Diaspora structures and others, and subsequently agreed to be nominated. Few days later the HHK officially nominated Sarkissian’s candidacy for the presidential election.

The 2018 presidential elections of Armenia will take place March 2. Under the amended Constitution, the 4th President of Armenia will be elected by Members of Parliament.

English –translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan