“May Monsignor Bagrat’s optimism defeat my pessimism,” Archbishop Mikael Ajapahian, the head of the Shirak Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church, told journalists.
Ajapahian said that Galstanian has made a number of mistakes during his campaign for regime change sparked by Pashinian’s territorial concessions to Azerbaijan. He singed out the protest leader’s cooperation with former Presidents Robert Kocharian and Serzh Sarkisian who lead the two opposition groups represented in the Armenian parliament.
Pashinian, his political allies and media outlets controlled by them have exploited that cooperation in an effort to discourage more Armenians, who are unhappy with their current and former rules, from taking to the streets.
Galstanian held fresh meetings with Kocharian, Sarkisian and senior opposition parliamentarians before resuming his antigovernment rallies in Yerevan on Wednesday. He pulled a visibly smaller crowd in the city’s Republic Square than he did during protests staged there in May and June.
ARMENIA - Supporters of Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian rally in Yerevan's central Republic Square, outside government headquarters on October 2, 2024.
In an apparent bid to attract a larger following, Galstanian appealed for a “broad consolidation” of opposition groups around his movement, saying that they must drop their “ambitions and arrogance” and put aside their differences. Ajapahian criticized that appeal.
“There are no [genuine] political forces in Armenia, and that’s the tragedy. He should have stayed in that May 9 format: independent and free,” he said, adding that this is the reason why Republic Square was packed with demonstrators that day.
Artsvik Minasian, a senior member of Kocharian’s Hayastan alliance that continues to strongly support Galstanian’s movement, dismissed the criticism, likening it to the Pashinian administration’s “propaganda.”
“This is the Armenian people’s movement which is now led by the Archbishop,” Minasian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Right after Wednesday’s rally, Galstanian and his supporters marched to the headquarters of Armenian Public Television to demand live airtime from the government-controlled broadcaster. The latter essentially met the demand after Galstanian agreed, for his part, to answer questions from its main talk show host.
In a 12-minute message broadcast shortly after midnight, Galstanian repeated his harsh criticism of Pashinian and urged Armenians to “wake up” and attend his next rally scheduled for Sunday. Ajapahian, who is also an outspoken critic of Pashinian, was unimpressed by the fellow archbishop’s televised remarks, saying that they were too “sentimental.”