The Government Understands the Mechanism Well, While the Opposition Does Not Yet: Arpine Hovhannisyan

In a post regarding the debate expectations and traps, former Minister of Justice Arpine Hovhannisyan commented on her Telegram channel.

“The proposal to ‘let's be civil’ is hard to dispute at first glance. In a normal political environment, it could be a very normal start for a civilized debate. However, political discourse doesn’t begin with the first session of parliament. It is preceded by an election campaign during which harsh assessments, accusations, and classifications not only polarize the political landscape but also shape voters' corresponding expectations. It is under these terms of discourse that both the government and the opposition received their votes.

Therefore, it is impossible to simply erase this entire historical context after the elections and start political relations from a ‘clean slate’. These are not just two parties' relations. They involve people and the narratives stemming from those people.

Today, the government continues to serve both its political behavior and the expectations of its electorate. In this context, the call for ‘civility’ is politically convenient for them. It could also be useful for the opposition if it weren't for the burden of its own pre-election discourse.

If you have presented extreme negative evaluations of the government to your electorate for months, if you've included individuals in your roster who distinguished themselves with such harsh political language, you've at least shown that this language is acceptable in your political sphere. Whether this is good or bad is another discussion. But it is a fact that must be taken into account after the elections.

Herein lies the trap of civility. Not because civility is a bad thing, but because it can turn into a tool for determining the permissible limits of political discourse, rather than responding to the demands for culture in political discourse.

The boundaries of political debate are broader than those of everyday polite conversation. Harsh, sharp, even seemingly offensive political evaluations do not automatically constitute personal insults.

And in today’s episode, I think it was also evident that the real reason for intolerance was hardly a single expression. The occasion was, of course, a specific expression, but the base for the reaction stemmed from years of accumulated intolerance toward that person's vocabulary, behavior, and speech.

In this case, the government was able to frame the particular expression within the violation of the ‘civility’ it previously advocated and focus all negative attitudes accumulated against that person on that instance. Meanwhile, the opposition, already having accepted the rules of this game, had very limited space to respond.

This is the trap of ‘civility’: first, you accept the criteria proposed by your opponent, and then, at the first boundary incident, it is your opponent who decides whether you have violated it or not.

It seems that the government understands this mechanism very well. The opposition, however, not so much.

Postscript: The phrase ‘to take advantage in a scoundrel-like way’ provides a harsh evaluation of the action, where ‘scoundrel-like’ is an adverb, while ‘scoundrel’ is a noun that characterizes a person. The former can be treated as very harsh, unacceptable, and worthy of equally harsh political counteraction. But identifying these two and defining the boundaries of political speech accordingly is an entirely different matter.”