On the initiative of Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, political consultations are being held with the leaders of a number of political forces. As part of the consultations, Nikol Pashinyan today met with Republic Party leader Aram Sargsyan.

Aram Sargsyan: Congratulations on your convincing victory, I wish you fruitful work.

Nikol Pashinyan: Thank you very much, glad to meet you, thank you for accepting my invitation. I would like to say that I followed your election campaign and, to be honest, I had a very good impression. I thought that the Republic Party might overcome the 5% threshold. Elections are elections, and many factors may influence the electoral process. Nevertheless, polls always have a certain factor of unpredictability.

I would like to hear your ideas about Armenia’s internal political life, future development, your party’s vision and your personal ideas about what to do, how you see the relationship between the Republic Party, the Government and the parliamentary majority. What specific concerns do you have based on your past experience? What can we do to create a more cohesive and positive political field in the country? I mean positive in terms of interaction between the government and the extra-parliamentary forces, since I think it is really very important to listen to each other. There may always be such ideas that get lost in the noise. I would like to talk more about these topics and see how much our ideas coincide.

Aram Sargsyan: Very well. The elections have really put everything back to its place. Today three political forces are going to parliament. I congratulated the other two parties on the fact that they went to the National Assembly, and I think that the best option for the general process would be to transfer the discussion to the platform of the National Assembly. We need to find a common ground between parliamentary forces, give up the old rhetoric, and find the right the formula for getting the nation out of this situation.

The task of extra-parliamentary forces in this respect is much easier. In my opinion, their influence is even less. The key word here is that you are prime minister for everyone, no matter which team they belong to. You should be the prime minister for the misguided, too. Their preferred political forces were striving to get into the National Assembly, but they have nothing to make noise about, their complaints have no context. We would be ridiculed for such complaints if we applied to the Constitutional Court based on the results of public opinion polls or a large number of people at rallies. This is just absurd.

In our part, I think we will always be close to the state and next to the state. The independence of the Republic of Armenia is what matters most. Our western approaches seek to balance the foreign policy field. We think it very important and we think it will help both the state and the politicians involved in foreign policy. And we intend to continue our work in this direction.

There are also proposals regarding the economic sphere, we are happy to present to the government what we have, we will try to make sure that they reach their integrity and become reality, and if they are rejected, they must be rejected reasonably, so that we can explain it to our partners, so that business is not offended.

While looking at cooperation prospects, the parties referred to issues related to the consolidation of opportunities and capacities nationwide.