Former president Levon Ter-Petrosian mainly supported the ongoing rapprochement with Turkey, but reiterated his longstanding demand for the current leadership to step down as he spoke to senior members of his opposition alliance on Wednesday.

The opposition leader also dismissed the “nationalist” criticism of President Serzh Sargsyan’s fence-mending deal with Ankara as “having nothing to do with real policies”.

“We are for both the Armenian-Turkish relations and the speediest settlement of the Karabakh conflict, which should be based on the principles of compromise and balance. But at the same time, we strongly oppose the establishment of a commission of Armenian and Turkish historians, which besides questioning the Armenian Genocide, will impede the Armenian-Turkish reconciliation instead of promoting it,” Ter-Petrosyan said in an hour-long speech in which he laid down the basic vision of the Armenian National Congress (ANC) of the current domestic and foreign policy challenges facing Armenia.

Yet, Ter-Petrosyan insisted that Serzh Sargsyan, whom the Armenian opposition views as lacking domestic legitimacy as president, must step down to avert “dangerous developments” in the Armenian-Turkish relations and the Karabakh conflict settlement.

“The issue of Serzh Sargsyan’s resignation draws the line between political forces. Those who demand it are real opposition, and those who don’t are on the government side no matter how much they try to show that they are really concerned over the mentioned undesirable developments,” stressed Ter-Petrosyan in an apparent reference to the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun), which has been vocally critical of the recently signed Armenian-Turkish protocols but has also pointedly stopped short of raising the demand for Sargsyan’s resignation.

In a further jibe at Dashnaktsutyun and other nationalist forces opposed to the fence-mending deal with Turkey, Ter-Petrosyan dismissed their rhetoric and insisted that his ANC expresses “the most realistic and clear position that meets the real interests of Armenia and Karabakh.”

“It can be seen with a naked eye that unlike the ANC, which spoke against the Armenian-Turkish protocols from the position of real policies, other forces shifted the issue into the ideological plane, that is the sphere of Hay Dat (Armenian Cause), which has nothing to do with real policies and real interests of our country,” said Ter-Petrosyan. “Slogans like ‘Not an inch of land’, ‘No concession’ or ‘No reconciliation’, no matter how clear they sound, are not a political position for me and they are fraught with the risk of putting our people before the danger of a national calamity. And when these slogans are not accompanied with the demand for a leadership change, they are also false and Pharisaic.”