Political scientist: Neither Pashinyan nor Manukyan deserve the  public`s trust

ArmInfo.Neither My Step, nor the RPA, PAP and ARF have any real intention to hold fair, transparent and fair elections in the country. Political scientist  Andrias Ghukasyan expressed this opinion to ArmInfo.

"I am convinced of a significant decrease in public confidence in all  these forces. Which is logically quite reasonable. Citizens see that  none of them even speaks about the need to create conditions  necessary for holding fair elections. All these forces are mainly  interested in either preserving or in the return of power, " he  stressed.

In Ghukasyan's opinion, in such conditions, neither Nikol Pashinyan,  nor Vazgen Manukyan, are figures worthy of the public's trust.   Accordingly, one should not expect preparation of fair, transparent  elections under their leadership. According to the political  scientist, the mere fact of keeping Pashinyan on the first line, as  the face of the "My Step" bloc, already speaks of the absence of  concern in this political force regarding this issue.

Meanwhile, practical steps towards organizing free, fair elections in  Armenia, in his opinion, are still a necessity, because there are  simply no conditions for such elections in the country. And the  system of election commissions operating in Armenia from the past has  not undergone any changes. Accordingly, falsifiers of election  results and fraudsters from the past remain in the electoral system.

In this light, the political scientist is convinced of the  declarative nature of the intentions to hold fair, normal elections  without changing election commissions and lustration of the CEC. He  also considers it necessary to automate the counting of election  results, which will eliminate the human factor in the process and  counting the voting results.

Moreover, according to Ghukasyan, the current law "On Parties" does  not in any way solve the problem of excluding from the process of  political activity parties that have been distributing pre-election  bribes for years. Meanwhile, the re-registration of political forces  in order to exclude further activities of bribe-givers is still a  necessity.

"This seems to be one of the most important problems. Since  participation in elections with fraudsters, in itself, is a  compromise in relation to these criminal forces.  Meanwhile, a  compromise with criminals cannot and should not be a priori. It is  impossible to create a legal, democratic state based on and this  problem has not received a legislative solution to this day - the  parliament has not yet given an assessment of the criminal regime.  And all proposals for legislative changes voiced today are only aimed  at facilitating the reproduction of the ruling force today,  "Ghukasyan concluded.