The ruling coalition’s announcement highlights the authorities’ disregard of democracy, elections and the public will.  The ruling coalition has openly declared that in the upcoming parliamentary elections they are not prepared to do what political forces are fundamentally meant to do: that is, to enter into open competition

President Serzh Sargsyan’s failure to go to Lisbon was an additional foreign policy blunder and an involuntary sign that Armenia’s diplomacy has accepted defeat. Acting upset and boycotting the NATO summit will not bring Armenia any diplomatic dividends. The practitioners of Armenia’s foreign policy should have done their best to avoid an unacceptable statement on Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijan’s minister of foreign affairs has found generally acceptable the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs’ new version of the principles for the settlement of the Karabakh conflict, proposed last December in Greece. This is the first occasion since 1997 that Baku has found the mediators’ proposal acceptable.

Now, it is Armenia’s turn and it will be difficult for Armenia to say "Yes" to the version that took shape first in Krakow in July 2009, then in Athens at the end of 2009 and then in Sochi on January 25, 2010, because in contrast to the 2007 Madrid proposals, not only is the right of the people of Nagorno Karabakh to self-determination very vague, but in terms of removing the consequences of the conflict, Azerbaijan is at an advantage.

Armenia’s double-digit economic decline continues, and is approaching 20 percent. The question in everyone’s mind is how long this drop will continue and whether the government’s policies are effective or sufficient to stop and eventually reverse it.

Today there are two substantial problems with the government’s response to this economic situation. The first is that the government’s guiding document, the budget adopted for 2009, is obsolete. The document is based on 9 percent economic growth while today we are experiencing 18 percent decline. There is a 27 percent discrepancy in the budget. Such a distorted document cannot serve as a blueprint or even a simple guideline for the government’s economic programs.

The topic of national mobilization is urgent today. Of course, given our size – small territory, small population – and given Turkey’s and Azerbaijan’s enormous capabilities and sophisticated machinery, we have always used all national and international resources albeit with varying intensity, scope, depth and effectiveness, but nevertheless we have used them.

Today, the changing circumstances around us, and the new challenges emerging before us, make the need for this kind of new mobilization more timely and necessary.

Let me cite four major reasons for this kind of mobilization at this time.