According to the draft of Armenia's new Constitution, the Republic is to be a parliamentary one, with the loss of most of the presidential powers, according to the first seven chapters of Armenia's proposed amended Constitution.
The main authority in the implementation of the constitutional reform will be the National Assembly of Armenia, which will include at least 101 members elected for five years. The President will remain the head of state, but he will be elected every seven years by MPs and the representatives of local governments. The same person can be elected only once as the president, but the Speaker of Parliament and the Prime Minister may be re-elected an unlimited number of times. The Prime Minister will be the Supreme Commander.
The vice president of the ANC, Levon Zurabyan, told Vestnik Kavkaza that the basic aim of the constitutional reform is incumbent President Serzh Sargsyan's effort to stay in power at the end of the presidential term.
Zurabyan noted that Armenia would completely destroy such a key element of a democratic state as the institution of elections. "The authorities have created a falsification machine which provides them with victory in any election. Planned policy changes are intended to overcome this," the deputy noted.
In this regard, the ANC member said that the opposition intends to oppose these plans. "If we understand that the core of these changes is the desire to perpetuate their own power, then of course we will try to unite the Armenian people around the goal of making the forthcoming referendum on the Constitution into a referendum of no confidence in Serzh Sargsyan's regime," Levon Zurabyan said.
The Director of the Armenian branch of the CIS Institute, Alexander Makarov, in his turn, noted that this constitutional reform will make the Prime Minister of the Government a key political player.
"The question of the possible existence in Armenia of a parliamentary form of government has been discussed in society for a long time. In fact, we can talk about a gradual transformation of government in the direction of the strengthening of the parliament's role. In this case, one of the reasons is the desire to increase the role of political parties in the political process and to formalize their participation in the formation of the government," Alexander Makarov said.
The director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, Ruben Safrastyan, expressed the view that parliamentary control over the state corresponds more to the Armenian mentality than a presidential Republic. "In my opinion, this radical shift from a presidential republic to a parliamentary one takes into account historical tradition, which is the discussion of issues by all the Armenian people," he said.
