The guests of A1+ "Your Theme" program were Varuzhan Hoktanyan, Executive Director of Transparency International Anti-corruption Center (TIAC); Gohar Simonyan, journalist, Nikol Pashinyan's proxy; Armen Hovhannisyan, blogger, activist of Mashtots Park Movement and Tigran Paskevichyan, writer and publicist. The guests addressed the following issues: what role do the observers play in the Armenian reality; what sort of elections resulted in the establishment of the new parliament; how do the authorities manage to forge elections this time?

The election process was monitored by more than 31 thousand local and 647 international observers. Some of the observers have already made their preliminary assessments. According to them an unequal playing field by violations of campaign provisions, undue interventions in the electoral process and cases of pressure on voters were causes for concern.

According to Varuzhan Hoktanyan, the reports by international observers have serious impact on international relations and the presence of observers plays a restraining role. There were fewer incidents of hard violations during these elections compared with the previous one when beatings and assaults were common. The provision of formal nature of election administration is at least the result of the reports. However, other ways were found to rig the elections this time. Hoktanyan cited Helsinki Committee of Armenia Chairman Avetik Ishkhanyan's words, who said that during these elections it was the polling stations that were stuffed with people.

Another reason for concern was the fact that during these elections bribe taking and voting in accordance was considered normal. Some of the bribe takers thought that for them it was ultimately the same who was elected. It is not only the authorities but also civil society and opposition parties that are to blame for that mentality.

In the opinion of Varuzhan Hoktanyan, apart from the main violations - unprecedented large number of vote bribes, exaggerated number of voters in lists, which was a great instrument in the hands of authorities, institutional fear and patron-client relationships - great boss and little people played a great role in the elections. Patron-client relations also lead to policy personification and people elect not political parties and programs but persons. It happens because of poverty and social polarization, which is typical of the archaic countries of the third world. Armenia ranks last among former Soviet countries in the rating of Gini coefficient of inequality.

Varuzhan Hoktanyan has observed an interesting tendency regarding opposition political parties. The main opposition forces since 1995 - National Self-determination Union, National Democratic Union, Communist Party, People's Party of Armenia, National Unity, and some other opposition forces after one or two convocations of Parliament disappear. Heritage Party which is considered to be an opposition political party hardly managed to overcome the 5 percent threshold, Armenian National Congress also had difficulty to gain seats in the parliament. Those forces are unable to propose alternative solutions in the current crisis.

In the opinion of Gohar Simonyan in committing election fraud, our mentality significantly matters. Another consideration was related to the great number of local monitors who were observing the elections. There were 15 locals in the precinct where she acted as a proxy and all of them presented the same person. Though there was a proxy of other majority candidate, he also presented the same major pro-government candidate. As for citizens, they are trenched and do not dare to vote for their preferable candidates.

To the mind of Armen Hovhannisyan it is impossible to conduct normal elections in a state if the authority is not ready to wave their power by peaceful constitutional manner. That is, we witnessed another violation of constitutional order, however, this time people were not imprisoned and blood was not shed.

According to Tigran Paskevichyan the role of observers is not effective, since everything is formally provided in our country, which is one of the greatest achievements of the Armenian second president - to create such a democracy, which exists from outside, but is not present inside. This formulation was given by Paskevichyan several years ago. The majority of current problems are related to the issue of access to information - internet is not an accessible area for all yet, no public response mechanism is provided and the opposition is unable to make its voice heard.