The ARF held its 15th Supreme Assembly in Aghavnadzor from June 4-6 and elected a nine member new Supreme Body from the original eleven members. Not selected was Hrayr Karapetyan, President of the Defense, Internal Affairs and National Security Permanent Committee in the National Assembly, and Artyusha Shahbazyan, Secretary of the ARF's parliamentary faction. According to Armen Rustamyan, re-elected as representative of the ARF's Supreme Body, the decrease in the size of the structure was basically a result of internal organizational issues. But, in reality, the fact that Hrayr Karapetyan and Artyusha Shahbazyan were not included, reflects developments taking place within the ARF. These two politicians have been known for their "loyal" attitude towards the current regime. By leaving them out of the new Supreme Body, the ARF is displaying its intentions, at least externally, of moving to the arena of a more radicalized opposition. The statement agreed upon by the Supreme Assembly also bears this out. In its statement, the ARF stresses the urgency of resolving some twenty basic problems facing Armenia, in the party's estimation. It singles out four dominant problems - restoration of the national roadmap, establishment of social justice, defense of citizens' rights and the conceptualization of a new government. Thus, it is possible to argue that the ARF is attempting to enter a more convincing and radical oppositional arena. This move definitely seeks to achieve pre-election objectives. The stinging defeat during the last presidential elections shows that the ARF is continuously losing its voter base; a base that had been regarded as the most stable of all the political forces. The signing of the two Armenian-Turkish Protocols and the social uproar regarding their ratification, created very favorable conditions for the party to regain that base. However, the ARF squandered that opportunity, ultimately failing to rally the nationalist and left forces under its banner and failing in its mission to generate social dissatisfaction directed against the foreign affairs policies conducted by the government. Yes, the ARF did launch a campaign entitled "No", that included fourteen other political parties and a host of civic organizations. However, it never became a serious domestic factor since it never propounded a specific political agenda based on the interests and expectations of wide segments of the society. On the contrary, by avoiding to take radical steps to prevent the Armenian-Turkish process of rapprochement that it called "traitorous", and by merely calling for the ouster of Foreign Affairs Minister Edward Nalbandyan, the ARF basically only created the illusion of being a movement of resistance, an imitation, and by doing so exposed its inability, or at least its unwillingness, to influence processes and to crystallize the political left. And this took place when the real opposition force, the HAK (Armenian National Congress),by pushing foreign affairs to the back-burner, left the field wide open for the ARF to act on this issue . Can we say that the ARF will be successful this time around by presenting a new political agenda? It is clear to all that the party had no chance of success with its former one. The decisions of the regime that seek to freeze the Armenian-Turkish Protocols' ratification process and the Karabakh conflict settlement Madrid negotiations, have deprived the ARF of a stage for self-aggrandizement and expression. To have any real chance of restoring its electoral base and to garner the 5% vote threshold in the 2012 parliamentary elections, the ARF has been forced to rethink and review the political agenda and tactics it has put forth to date. This is the reason why the ARF has given foreign affairs, as a dominant problem, a very general formulation - the restoration of a national roadmap. Furthermore, the party refrains from clearly saying whether it believes the authorities in Armenia up till now have followed a "non-national" roadmap. Instead, the desire of the ARF to stress social and legal issues in its list of priorities is evident; a focus that was absent in the past. In other words, the ARF is trying to execute a smooth transfer to the arena of internal social life and has already echoed the real expectations of the public. Armen Rustamyan says, "Much more serious experiences can be waiting for us and post-elections tensions can become even more extreme because everything has its limits. One day the people will come to that realization and that spirit of rebellion can be self-generating. We do not even rule out the possibility that there can be a social revolt even today." In conjunction with this, the party is delicately putting forward the notion of regime change through elections, without specifying whether it is talking about snap elections or the next round of scheduled elections. "We want to achieve regime change through elections. This is the correct way. Changing the powers that be through upheavals is always dangerous and damaging, especially when Armenia and the Armenian people find themselves in an ongoing, unresolved war situation," added Armen Rustamyan. It would appear that the ARF is finally being transformed from being an imaginary opposition force into a real one. But this is only a deceptive impression. The problem is that the ARF has absolutely no idea how to go about it. The party, rather than adhering to the dictates of its stable political roadmap , is trying adjust that map to the public feelings and sentiments in the street at any given moment. These were first linked to foreign challenges, today they are domestic. This is the reason why the ARF today is not capable of supplying a rational answer to the question as to why it never wanted to see the pre-conditions that existed in the country for such a "social revolt", both when the party was a member of the ruling coalition and for more than one year after it left the coalition. Then too, there is the question as to how the ARF is preparing to realize regime change as a result of such elections when the party sees itself as a victim of those elections and when it refused to contest their results both in 2007 and 2008, preferring to adapt to the reality created. Against the backdrop of all this, the diverse proclamations of the ARF leave an impression of populism, more than anything else. And this too further damages the authority of the party.