{"id":359337,"date":"2018-05-02T08:32:00","date_gmt":"2018-05-02T07:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/armenian-parliament-rejects-pro-western-opposition-leaders-bid-to-be-prime-minister\/"},"modified":"2018-05-02T08:32:00","modified_gmt":"2018-05-02T07:32:00","slug":"armenian-parliament-rejects-pro-western-opposition-leaders-bid-to-be-prime-minister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/armenian-parliament-rejects-pro-western-opposition-leaders-bid-to-be-prime-minister\/","title":{"rendered":"Armenian parliament rejects pro-Western opposition leader\u2019s bid to be prime minister"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"content\">\n<h3 class=\"nomargin\">\u00a0<\/h3>\n<h2>Armenian parliament rejects pro-Western opposition leader\u2019s bid to be prime minister<\/h2>\n<h5>\n<p>    By<br \/>\n    Clara Weiss<br \/>\n    <br \/>2 May 2018<\/p>\n<\/h5>\n<p>After mass protests that forced Armenia\u2019s prime minister Serzh Sargsyan to resign last Monday, the leader of the liberal opposition bloc, Nikol Pashinyan, failed to secure a majority vote in the parliament in his bid to be elected prime minister on May 1.<\/p>\n<p>While the mass protests that led to the Sargsyan\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/articles\/2018\/04\/25\/arme-a25.html\">resignation<\/a> were motivated not least of all by social grievances in a country where almost every fifth person is unemployed and every third lives beneath the official poverty line, the liberal opposition has been quick to assert political control over the movement to advance its own agenda.<\/p>\n<p>The vote took place under extraordinarily tense conditions with media reports indicating that the entire country came to a stand-still as the parliament was heatedly debating Pashinyan\u2019s candidacy. Thousands watched the nine-hour parliamentary debate live from the Republican Square in the country\u2019s capital Yerevan.<\/p>\n<p>In a call last week with the former acting prime minister Karen Karapetyan, who replaced Sargsyan as acting prime minister last Monday, Russian president Vladimir Putin stated that his government was insisting on a \u201cpeaceful transition\u201d in keeping with the results of the 2017 parliamentary elections. This implied the Kremlin\u2019s ongoing support for the ruling Republican Party, which secured an overwhelming majority of votes in the last parliamentary elections. The opposition bloc Pashinyan represents won, by contrast, only some 8 percent of the votes.<\/p>\n<p>Over the past week, Pashinyan called for numerous demonstrations to pressure the government into accepting him as prime minister, drawing the support of tens of thousands of people. He warned the&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/articles\/2018\/05\/02\/arme-m02.html\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 Armenian parliament rejects pro-Western opposition leader\u2019s bid to be prime minister By Clara Weiss 2 May 2018 After mass protests that forced Armenia\u2019s prime minister Serzh Sargsyan to resign last Monday, the leader of the liberal opposition bloc, Nikol Pashinyan, failed to secure a majority vote in the parliament in his bid to be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2526,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-359337","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2526"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}