“168 Zham” says that campaigning for Armenia’s April 2 parliamentary elections promises to be quite eventful and even “colorful.” “For now, that is mainly taking the form of advertising and various displays, rather than substance,” writes the paper. “The first two days of the campaign have highlighted the fact that the upcoming elections will be a struggle between money and more money. The lavish posters and other campaign material testify to that. It should be clear in the next few days whether political forces can switch from form to substance.”
“Chorrord Ishkhanutyun” also sees a lack of substance in the election campaign. The paper says public reactions to campaign ads aired by election contenders have centered not on their content but on prominent public figures featured by them.
“The campaign is involving not so much presentation of one’s own ideas and programs as a race to say something about one’s rivals,” editorializes “Aravot.” The paper also claims that any outcome of the elections “will change nothing in our life.”
In an interview with “Zhoghovurd,” Ara Harutiunian, Nagorno-Karabakh’s prime minister, confirms Prime Minister Karen Karapetian’s revelation that diesel fuel supplied to army units in Armenia and Karabakh last year was of poor quality. “To my knowledge, low-quality diesel fuel has been in the market for many years,” he says. “It has been used by farmers, transport equipment and other vehicles. As for the April [2016] events, I can state that both at that time and in the following months private construction firms working for the [Karabakh] Defense Army had many problems with fuel because it was hastily purchased by the government from private suppliers.”
“Haykakan Zhamanak” reports that the Armenian Ministry of Finance will likely sell soon more Eurobonds that will be worth between $500 million and $700 million. “According to our information, a political decision to take this step has already been made,” writes the paper. “The main specificity of this issuance is that the Eurobonds will be denominated in drams, rather than a hard currency.” It says that the planned borrowing could breach an Armenian law that limits the size of the country’s public at 60 percent of Gross Domestic Product. The government might therefore amend that law, it claims.
(Tigran Avetisian)