YEREVAN (RFE/RL) — Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said his Civil Contract party does not espouse any of the traditional political ideologies as it held on Sunday, June 16, its first congress since coming to power one year ago.
“We are a party that has rejected ‘isms’ because hardened ideologies no longer exist in the contemporary world,” Pashinyan told delegates of the congress. “In the political sense, we are not liberal, we are not centrist, we are not social democrat; we are a civil party.”
“What does this mean?” he said. “This means that we place ourselves beyond ideological standards and we are forming a new ideological plane which is based on four key pillars: statehood, citizenship, national identity and personality.”
Pashinyan set up Civil Contract in 2013 after splitting from former President Levon Ter-Petrosian’s Armenian National Congress. It operated as a non-governmental organization mostly uniting young civic activists before becoming a full-fledged political party in 2015. Critics, notably the former ruling Republican Party, have accused it of lacking ideological clarity.
Civil Contract served as Pashinyan’s core support base during the April-May 2018 “velvet revolution” which brought the 44-year-old former journalist to power. It is also the dominant force in a more broad-based My Step bloc which Pashinyan formed following the revolution. The bloc won 70 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections held in December.
Despite being the party’s top leader, Pashinyan has never headed it officially. Civil Contract stuck to this tradition at its weekend congress in Yerevan which elected the party’s new governing board. The board in turn appointed Minister for Local Government Suren Papikyan as its chairman.
