During a public meeting last weekend in Gyumri, Armenia President Arman Sarkissian said the country must realistically prioritize its future agenda and that he would spare no effort “to get Armenia on the right path.”

Sarkissian said he had met with Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan and opposition leaders and is trying to gather all around one table to discuss the country’s post-war plight.

Sarkissian repeated his call that the current government must resign.

"From the first day, as president, I proposed a solution that is quite simple, that the government must resign. It is exceedingly difficult to continue when you have lost. Even if the government is not to blame, the page must be closed and opened again to instill hope because people live with hope. In the early 1990s, there was no gas, no wood, people were hungry, but they held out hope that we would win the war, have a state, and so on."

Sarkissian argued that the Armenian nation, despite its small state, is a global nation with huge resources to go forward.

The hardest thing for me in these two and a half years has been that I have worked every day, but I have given this country only five percent of my potential, I am not an executive president. My only tool is my word, and the word is to give people hope. My dream is to create conditions for the next generation to come to power with its own way of thinking, of attitude, culture, devotion and honesty. Those people will lead the country ten and twenty years from now,” Sarkissian said.

Responding to the question raised by the participants whether the government has drafted a set of programs to extricate the country from its current plight, Sarkissian said that the first step is for the government to resign, form a transitional administration, and then hold parliamentary elections in a year or eighteen months.

“If we want to have normal elections, we must change the Electoral Code, we must change the Constitution. The only way is to have a professional government. let all the other politicians prepare for the elections. These people should have time to consolidate. New leaders should come to the fore, especially younger ones,” Sarkissian said.

He said that MPs should meet with their constituents and be held accountable for their actions.

When asked by a teacher what educators can do right now, Sarkissian replied that educators have an important role to play and that any change must start in the classroom.

"In ten or twenty years our children may not even know what happened today. Many of our young people do not remember 1988 or the war of the 1990s. But it is very important that those children, who are your students today, be healthy in body and soul and get the right knowledge," Sarkissian said.