Following the statement from Prosperous Armenia (BHK) leader Gagik Tsarukyan’s proclamation that the Armenian government should step down due to the mishandling the coronavirus crisis and its related socioeconomic consequences (Caucasus Watch reported), the BHK officials accused the Armenian government of launching a smear campaign against Tsarukyan.

The Armenian Radio Free Europe reported that on 8 June,  a newspaper controlled by Pashinyan’s family published a purported copy of a Soviet Armenian court’s decision to convict Tsarukyan of involvement in a 1979 gang rape of two women outside Yerevan and decision to sentence him to 7 years in prison. While not denying such a prison sentence, Tsarukyan’s representatives accused the authorities of manipulating facts and resorting to dirty tricks. The next day, the BHK published another document showing that Armenia’s Court of Cassation overturned the 1979 verdict and acquitted Tsarukyan in the mid-1990s.

On the same day, the BHK officials held an emergency meeting where the leadership reiterated the previously made statements. “We have nothing to add to the previous statements. Nothing is carried out in any state of urgency. The meeting of our political board was urgent. We said that this agenda was imposed on us due to the situation in the country, about which we have already disseminated a message,” said Tsarukyan’s spokesperson Iveta Tonoyan.

Representatives of the opposition faction in Armenia’s parliament, the Bright Armenia party (LHK), on the other hand questioned the wisdom of demanding Pashinyan’s resignation during the state of emergency. “Let’s assume that there is a [parliamentary] vote of no confidence [regarding] the prime minister. Who will be the next prime minister? Is there any candidate for the job who is ready to work with this kind of a [parliamentary] majority?” said the LHK parliamentarian Ani Samsonyan. 

Armen Grigoryan, the secretary for Armenia’s Security Council, claimed that Tsarukyan and his BHK have been trying to help the country’s former rulers return to power. “That BHK is positioning itself as a fifth column and trying to associate itself with the former regime and carry out its reproduction,” he said, adding that the BHK’s and other opposition groups’ calls for Pashinyan’s resignation are tantamount to high treason because they come at a time when Armenia is “literally waging a war against a hidden enemy.” 

The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) also publicly accused the Armenian government of misdoing, stating that Pashinyan must be held accountable for the government’s failure to contain the deadly epidemic.

Pashinyan responded to those statements by accusing Dashnaktsutyun and other critics of spreading a “political coronavirus” in Armenia. “In my view, unlike the healthcare coronavirus, it will lead to the political death of all political and social forces that have characteristics of this bacillus,” he said. “You will see that those political forces will be completely driven out of Armenia’s political and public life because… their current actions… are building their political tombstones,” he declared. 

Comparing the coronavirus crisis to a war, Pashinyan said that the oppositions’ criticism amounts to high treason. “In times of war, what do they do to those who spread panic and false information and speak out against the commander? They put them on trial in accordance with the logic of a warlike situation. We are obviously not pursuing such a policy because we are a democratic country,” he added. “It is the public that will throw [the] detractors into the trash heap of Armenia’s history,” he emphasized.

One of Dashnaktsutyun’s leaders, Ishkhan Saghatelyan, quickly responded to Pashinyan’s statements. “We will continue to fight against those who spread both the political and real coronavirus. As regards ending up in a political trash heap, it’s the authorities that have every reason to be deeply worried about that,” he wrote on Facebook.