LACK OF ADHERENCE TO PRINCIPLES: POLITICIANS SAY ONE THING, BUT DO ANOTHER
Tert
Oct 23 2009
Armenia
It turns out that parliamentary political parties carry out such
activities during their legislative work that in no way corresponds
with their pre-election promises and programs. Such a conclusion
was reached by a group of analysts and journalists monitoring the
legislative activity of politicians in the National Assembly.
The two groups of analysts studied the political parties’ activities
during the previous 2 sessions and came to a conclusion, perhaps
agreed by the entire nation, that political parties don’t keep their
promises and act only in their own or their party’s interests.
The results from this monitoring were presented today at the American
University of Armenia business center where a number of MPs, analysts
and journalists were present. The head of the monitoring journalists’
group, Lusine Vasilyan, stated the aim of their work is finding
the means which would allow them to find out the correspondence
between politicians’ pre-election programs and their (post-election)
activities.
As a result of the monitoring, the researchers came to three main
conclusions. As presented by the group’s representative, Tigranuhi
Ghevondyan, for at least over a year (since the group monitored
the parties’ legislative activities over the past two sessions),
politicians didn’t carry out their pre-election programs.
The monitors qualified their second conclusion as "lack of adherence
to one’s principles": they discoverd that politicians didn’t adhere
to their own principles during their parliamentary work — they said
one thing and voted for another.
The third negative occurrence recorded by the monitors was that
coalition agreements and interests rather than individual promises
and approaches prevailed in the past sessions.
"Individual approaches, programs, and principles were subdued by those
agreements to such an extent that one doubts their existence at all,"
Ghevondyan said.