Tuesday, January 23 2018 16:29

ArmInfo. Serzh Sargsyan needs a "representative" president in order to smear political responsibility. The deputy chairman of the opposition party "Armenian National Congress" Levon Zurabyan expressed opinion to ArmInfo. "We repeatedly said before the constitutional referendum that Serzh Sargsyan started reforming the Constitution not only with the aim of reproducing his own power. With the amendment of the Basic Law, Sargsyan actually bypassed the ban on the third presidential term while simultaneously smearing political responsibility for the decisions made in the country," said the politician. On January 19, the incumbent President of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan, actually announced RA Ambassador to Britain, former Armenian Prime Minister Armen Sargsyan as the candidate of the ruling Republican Party for the presidency of the country. The presidential elections in Armenia will be held on March 2, the parliament deputies, in which the majority of the mandates belong to the Republican Party of Armenia, will elect the president. Further in April, the new president will appoint a new prime minister from the same RPA. "In Armenia, especially after the last parliamentary elections, everything is decided by Serzh Sargsyan together with the Republican Party of Armenia under his control, so before I announced the candidacy of Armen Sargsyan for the presidency I argued that whoever was elected the fourth president of Armenia in such a system of government can only be assigned the role of puppet, and the puppet master will be Serzh Sargsyan," the oppositionist said. Noting the extreme curtailment of the functions of the future president of Armenia in favor of the government and the prime minister, in particular, the politician pointed to one of the articlesfull of the Constitution according to which it is the president who should conclude international treaties. Thus, according to the politician, the president, not by the prime minister of Armenia, will sign any official agreement between the sides of the Karabakh conflict. In this regard, the future president is an ideal opportunity for the future prime minister to blur political responsibility, for example, for decisions on Karabakh. At the same time, Zurabyan is convinced that Serzh Sargsyan will make the real decisions. "The ANC, the opposition, as a whole, do not recognize the official results of the referendum on reforming the country's Basic Law: the results of the referendum were falsified by the authorities, but in reality the people, without any doubt, voted against these changes," Zurabyan summed up. At a referendum on December 6, 2015, 66.2% of citizens voted "for" making amendments to the Constitution transforming Armenia into a parliamentary republic, in which the real power will be concentrated in the hands of the prime minister. The new president will be deprived of levers of influence on foreign and defense policy. The armed forces will report to the Minister of Defense, and the functions of the supreme commander-in-chief are assigned to the prime minister during the period of military operations. The main candidate for the premier's post from the RPA is its leader Serzh Sargsyan.