Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan joined Catholicos of All Armenians, His Holiness Karekin II, and National Assembly Speaker Ararat Mirzoyan to attend a reception organized for public administration system representatives on the occasion of New Year and Christmas.

Addressing the audience, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated:
“Dear National Assembly Speaker,
Dear Deputy Speakers,
Dear Deputy Prime Ministers,
Government members,
Mayor of Yerevan,
Honorable Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces,
State officials,
Dear guests,

Governments are supposed to control everything in a totalitarian system. In democratic systems, the system of public administration must be guided by the well-known medical principle of doing no harm while intervening, that is to say, the first mission of the system of government is to refrain from impeding the country’s economic, political and public life.

Our government has set a political task to be guided by this very logic, and, summing up the year, we must naturally ask how well we have accomplished this task and how well we did in 2019.

In general, if we look at the results, we have good, sometimes very good, sometimes brilliant results, and what does this mean or what should we record in the context of all that is said? We have to admit that sometimes we worked well, even very well; sometimes we worked poorly, and even very poorly. This is a record that is probably very important to do when summarizing 2019 and preparing for 2020.

In fact, we must admit that we are trying to implement democratic reforms in Armenia’s largely authoritarian system of governance that have inherited from the past. This record should not sound like an accusation, but it should sound like a record of our current reality. We need to diagnose the problem accurately; we need to formulate the question correctly to find the right answers.

What is our response to this situation? Our response to this situation is the process of public administration reform that we must pursue consistently. The correct assessment of this situation is a personalized approach to evaluating the performance of public servants in the public administration system, and the correct response to this situation is to achieve the ideological commonality and harmony in the public administration system. This is a difficult task, but we should follow that path step by step. I can state that every month at the government level, teamwork logic, harmonious work is increasingly felt. That is, I think, noticeable, and we should continue this process as close to perfection as possible.

We are facing performance-related problems everywhere in the public administration system, but in general we need to approach the problem in a balanced and thoughtful way, and in each case we must score twice before we cut once.

In general, we are widely blamed for not being sufficiently revolutionary in our attitude towards the public administration system, but I would also like to draw your attention to the fact that the non-violent, velvet, popular revolution of 2018 had the same methodology; It was a revolution measured seven times and cut once, and so it was the method that produced the result, and it was not the only political change in the country. There were forces in Armenia for which political change was an end in itself, and sometimes it was announced that it could be achieved by any means. We have never thought that way, and we will never do so, because what matters to us is not the change itself, but the content of change. And this approach led to the fact that we have what we have in the first full year of the revolution.

Let me say that this is an exceptional post-revolutionary year. But I will not insist because I cannot say that that there is a country in the world that has ever encountered such a precedent, but it seems hardly likely that 7.5% economic growth could be achieved in the first full post-revolutionary year, when stability could be ensured in the Armed Forces, in the judiciary and in other areas following drastic political changes. To have a revolution and not to have instability - this is an exceptional phenomenon in itself, and I want to say once again that this is already a testimony to we boast a well-established statehood and public institutions in the Republic of Armenia. We must confess this, and we should rejoice in this fact, we should be proud of it. But we record that the degree of fulfillment that exists, yes, we can also be proud of it, but our ambitions, our aspirations, I mean our people’s aspirations and ambitions are growing bigger and bigger, and I want us all to get rid of poor practices and take along all the positive we had in 2019 on the way to 2020.

Dear attendees, let me wish you all a Happy New Year and Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year and Merry Christmas to all your family members, your ministries, departments, government, local government and judiciary and wish that in 2020 we could not only build on what we achieved in 2019, but to make tangible and visible the positive changes.

Therefore, long live the Republic of Armenia! Long live our children and we who live and will live in a free and happy Armenia. Of course, the Republic of Armenia is a free, sovereign, dignified state, and the Republic of Armenia will be freer, more sovereign and more dignified with each passing year. Thank you.”