“Zhamanak” says that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s political allies will almost certainly win the upcoming snap municipal elections in Yerevan. “The key question is in what format Pashinian’s team will participate in them … and who its mayoral candidate will be,” writes the paper. It says that the team lacks charismatic figures and other individuals capable of holding senior state positions. Armenia’s capital should be governed by a charismatic figure like Pashinian, it says.
“Zhoghovurd” says that some political forces have already started campaigning for the mayoral elections even though no dates have been set for them yet. “Some representatives of the parties making up the government are trying to prove that they deserve to top the list of candidates for the municipal council,” writes the paper. “And they are trying to convince not so much the public as the leaders of their parties.” The latter, meanwhile, are in no rush to pick mayoral candidates, it says.
“Aravot” quotes the head of the State Revenue Committee (SRC), Davit Ananian, as saying that he must not be expected to appoint honest “angels” to key posts in the national tax and customs service. “He is certainly right,” editorializes the paper. “If you fire hundreds of corrupt tax inspectors and replace them by young people you cannot guarantee that they will do a better job.” It says that changing the country’s deeply rooted “culture of corruption” is not as easy as it might appear.
“Hayots Ashkhar” says that fallout from a controversial exercise held by Russian troops in an Armenian village this week is “threatening to cause a serious crisis in Russian-Armenian relations.” “Judging from the preliminary and obviously hasty conclusions drawn by the new authorities, they have not decided what position they will take with regard to what happened,” writes the paper. “The head of the National Security Service considers the incident to be the result of negligence and sees no political implications. By contrast, the prime minister made a strange statement that looks like an unsolvable puzzle: ‘I regard that as a provocation against Armenian-Russian relations.’” The paper dismisses Pashinian’s claim.
(Tigran Avetisian)