With less than five or six months to go before next year’s presidential election, Serzh Sarkisian and Levon Ter Petrosian are not the only ones attempting to attract a following for the vote. As mentioned in a previous post, so too is the Sksela (It’s Started) youth movement, a loose grouping of young people hoping to establish themselves as the Armenian equivalent of other similar groups in the post-Soviet space.

Sksela first came to prominence in the run-up to the 12 May parliamentary election. In April, EurasiaNet published my article on the movement. Since then, however, interest in Sksela has waned and observers were never convinced they could mobilize significant numbers of youth in Yerevan, let alone Armenia, anyway.

Youth in newspaper hats stand on street corners and read aloud from Armenian dailies. Masked young people march by parliament yelling “Don’t Eat Too Much!” at deputies. It’s election season in Armenia, and with the parliamentary vote just over a month away, one unconventional youth group is waging weekly war on widespread political apathy.

[…]

The group claims that its purpose is not overtly political, and, at first glance, for many passers-by, the February march through town that also aimed to “wake up society from its winter slumber” appeared to be just a celebration of the traditional Lenten holiday of Barekendan. But hidden among the color and noise which define every Sksela event, a political message is becoming more evident as the May 12 vote approaches.

[…]

Some observers are already trying to make comparisons between Sksel a and Georgia’s Kmara (Enough) or Ukraine’s Pora! (It’s Time!), youth groups that played key roles in those countries’ respective 2003 and 2004 revolutions.

The full post is available on the 2008 Presidential Election Monitor Blog.