“Not according to a document, but heart and soul -- our government, your president!” That’s how Hasmik Ghazaryan, a teacher from Katnaghbiur village in the Aragatsotn Marz (province) introduced Stepan Demirchyan and the leaders of the Ardarutiun (Justice) Bloc and to her fellow villagers. In other places, the message is essentially the same. The people have decided that Stepan Demirchyan was elected president of Armenia and they don’t want to back down, although the question remains -- Will Stepan Demirchyan stand by their decision, too?

A resident of the village of Tsaghkunk in the Gegharkunik Marz wrote down their problems and was going to hand the letter to the leaders of the Justice Bloc. It was surprising, to say the least, that the villagers were pinning their hopes for solving their problems on the opposition. “What can we do? We don’t trust the government. We told them, we wrote them so many times. It was no use.” What will they get from the Justice Bloc, especially if it achieves a majority in the parliament and forms the government?

In any case, after traveling on terribly pitted roads to the Sevan region, Stepan Demirchyan complained to no one in particular, “Couldn’t they fix one road?” Then, of course, he immediately added, “To rebuild the country you have to start with the villages.” In every village he visits, Stepan Demirchyan is received with a sacrificed sheep. And most of the time there are children at the meeting, who are let out of classes for the occasion. The sheep, as a rule, is slaughtered in the central square of the village, where a fresh pool of blood remains until the meeting is over.

In its meetings with the people, especially in the marzes, the Justice Bloc raises several issues: a) it presents the essence of the constitutional amendments and calls on voters to vote against them; b) it warns of the existence of a pseudo-opposition; c) it warns voters about, as Vardan Grigoryan puts it, “the Ardarutiun cooperative”; d) it attests that the Constitutional Court gave Kocharyan a year to hold a confidence referendum.

The rest derives from this.

In any case, people’s expectations of the opposition during the meetings are quite modest. In all the villages we visited, they demanded “Arshak Sadoyan in person”. He is present on most visits to the marzes. However, to judge from the applause, Stepan Demirchyan unreservedly has the highest rating, Aram Z. Sargissyan is in second place, and then comes Aram Karapetyan (if present) or Arshak Sadoyan. In the village of Katnaghbiur, Sadoyan announced, “If we get the majority in the National Assembly, we will solve all the problems within a month.” And he explained how to do that: “The most important thing is to say no to Kocharyan’s constitution. If you reject his constitution, his house of cards will collapse.”

By the second or third meeting, a reporter no longer has to pay attention to the speakers, and can talk to villagers about their problems. The speeches become repetitive and the villagers rarely take the floor. Sometimes the villagers surround the leaders of the bloc and tell them their problems. In Ddmashen, Vazgen Manukyan said, “We live in this country, we see the problems. And we can also see the way out”. Stepan Demirchyan said in Geghamavan, “If they (the government - A.G.) don’t care, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to take care of people’s problems.” Some of these people are thinking about leaving Armenia if they are cheated once again in these elections. And by cheated they mean not only in terms of potential falsifications, but also if the opposition, if elected, fails to fulfill their expectations.

In the town of Talin, an old man predicted that some people will leave the country even before the elections: “The population of Talin was 10,000 before 1988, and now there are hardly 3,000 people left. Another 100 people will leave before the elections”. And as for who should stay and fight for the well being of the country and the people, there were various ideas in the marzes. “What can we do, they (the opposition - A. G.) should fight.” Or, “You know why the people are to blame? The people clearly voted (for Demirchyan - A.G.), they should have stood up in the same way, en masse, with scythes, rakes and pitchforks, to defend their votes.”

Residents of cities and towns are more easily subjected to pressure. In the villages people can at least earn their daily bread by working the land, but in cities the number of jobs is so limited that those who are employed are blackmailed, especially on the eve of the elections. In Sevan, for example, people told us that it is impossible to work in the recently opened Jermuk tunnel. There is no ventilation system and after working for a couple of hours people start to choke -- they go out to breathe for one or two hours and then go back. But none of them complain because when they did in the past their employer told them that he would fire them. “If you don’t work somebody else will, there are a lot of unemployed people.” It’s the same thing in Talin. A middle-aged man complained about how his 22-year-old son is exploited at the diamond processing factory - they pay 7 drams (about 1 cent) for grinding one stone and they make him work six days a week, ten and a half hour a day. But he won’t quit, because he’s the only one in the family with a job. “80 % of the people are going to leave the country, because they are mistreated,” they told us in Sevan.

Aram G. Sargissyan said in Ddmashen, “People will resist the pressure if they know that justice will be established.” But what if justice is not established along with Justice?