Speech of President Serzh Sargsyan at the extraordinary session of the Government

Dear Colleagues,

I congratulate you on your appointment as members of the Government.

I believe nobody here doubts that we, together with you, have a lot of hard work to do. The enormous credit of confidence that we received from our voters has doubled our responsibility. I also believe that nobody should doubt the resolve and seriousness with which we are going to take up the work.

I call upon you to get ready for a hard but also honorary mission; it is a mission. Winning in the elections doesn’t mean to rest on laurels; on the contrary, nobody promised us any laurels. We’ve been sent here to work, to work selflessly, diligently, with a deep sense of responsibility.

After the May 6 elections, we have a qualitatively new, incomparably more open society. It means that every step of the members of the Government – official as well as casual – will be closely followed not only by the President and the Parliament but also by our entire society. It means that our Government too should be on a qualitatively new level.

As you can see, we didn’t make any revolutionary changes in the composition of the Government. It is conditioned by the intention not to rupture the programs and reforms already underway. However, it doesn’t mean that we will not anticipate revolutionary results from our executive branch. We have promised our citizens to introduce changes ranging from the quality of everyone’s daily life to state governance, from the opportunities to work and earn money to higher education and affordability of health care, changes everywhere, and these changes must not be delayed.

Our greatest achievement of recent years has been the transformation of the Armenian economy, which took place in the wake of a difficult period following the global financial and economic crisis. Structural changes of the economy, a new working style with the private sector, a considerable enhancement of the consolidating role of the state in the business activities have allowed to provide new investments and technological solutions, as well as a pretty much stable social policy.

The chain of reforms must vigorously go through every area: we have already discussed it. Increased efficiency of state governance, consistence elimination of duplication in the works of the state institutions as well as the results of all other initiated reforms should be noticeable for each citizen.

Now, I would like to direct your attention towards the rural areas and our villagers. We must assist our farmers to crop, preserve and sell their produce. We must always stay by our farmers; only then the agriculture will yield double results, and I have no doubt about that.

In 2012, the priority for our Government is to provide a 7 percent economic growth. Economic growth is not an end in itself; our goal is to lay a solid foundation for a sustainable and constant development, persistent reduction and a total eradication of poverty in the visible future. This will be the first indicator of your work.

As stipulated by the Constitution, we have to come back to the issue of forming government after the Presidential elections in 2013. At that very time, the statistical service will have summarized the economic situation of the previous year, and we will have results of the Government’s activities for 2012 and the previous five years. Then, we will have another opportunity to reassess the ongoing programs and the quality of the conducted works.

I trust the tasks I’ve set are clear for you all.

I wish the new Armenian government every success. In the coming years, much, if not everything, will be conditioned by that success.