European Forum

Armenian ruling party sweeps polls in high-profile Yerevan municipal election

On May 28th Yerevan saw its first ever municipal election. According to Central Election Commission’s (CEC) official results as of June 1st, with all the ballots counted, the ruling Republican Party (HHK) won a landslide victory of 47.4%, enough to re-install its top candidate, Gagik Beglarian, as Yerevan mayor. The Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK), one of HHK’s two junior partners in the ruling coalition, came in a distant second with 22.7%. Trailing the BHK was the main opposition Armenian National Congress (HAK), which the official vote results of 17.4%, well below its expectations.

High-Profile Municipal Elections
The Yerevan municipal elections were established as a result of EU-backed constitutional amendments in 2007. Previously, the Armenian capital’s mayor was appointed by the President. Presently, Yerevan’s inhabitants will have the opportunity to elect a 65-member local council. A 40% stake in the vote gives the party in question the right to provide the city’s mayor.

The election campaign had dominated Yerevan’s (and Armenia’s) political life for the past month or so. Apart from Yerevan being the political centre of the country, with about 40% of Armenia’s population residing in the city, the leader of the biggest opposition Armenian National Congress (HAK) Levon Ter Petrosian had declared that he saw it as a continuation of the controversial Presidential elections of 2008 – in which he had been the main opposition candidate – that were followed by clashes between security forces and opposition activists resulting in 10 deaths.

However, it wasn’t just the HAK that considered the election crucial. All contending parties had gone out of their way, organising campaign rallies on a virtually daily basis in the run-up to the election. The main contenders were already mentioned ruling HHK, its close ally and coalition member BHK, the HAK and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) ‘Dashnaktutiun’, which left the ruling coalition in April in protest against the government’s conciliatory policy towards Turkey.

Orinats Yerkir, the third party represented in Sarkisian’s government, finished fourth with only 5.2%. ARF Dashnaktsutyun fared even worse, getting about 4.7%, according to the CEC. The other contenders, the Labour Socialist Party of Armenia (LSPA) and the People's Party gained 0.5% and 2.1% respectively. With the legal vote threshold for single parties seeking to gain seats in Yerevan’s Council of Elders set at 7%, this means that neither of the four will be represented in the new municipal assembly.

Criticism by the opposition
The CEC put voter turnout at over 53 percent. The highest turnout, more than 65 percent, was registered in the city’s Malatia-Sebastia district, scene of the largest number of vote irregularities reported by the Armenian opposition, media and independent observers.
The first vote results showing a HHK victory were released at around midnight following opposition allegations of widespread fraud. Levon Zurabian, a HAK leader, said the authorities have held ‘yet another criminal election,’ and that ‘vote rigging had a systematic character’. Zurabian singled out vote buying as the most frequent form of fraud registered by the opposition. He also alleged widespread intimidation of and violence against opposition proxies in the polling stations.

HAK’s negative assessment of the election administration was shared by the opposition Zharangutyun (Heritage) party, which did not contest the vote but closely monitored its conduct. Armen Martirosian, Zharangutyun’s parliamentary leader, stated: ‘we have botched the first election of the Yerevan council in a disgraceful fashion.’ Martirosian decried ‘widespread’ bussing of allegedly bribed voters by the country’s two main governing parties. He said Zharangutyun has also registered ‘many instances of violence’ and ballot stuffing. ‘I think the police performance today was a disaster,’ he charged.

Predictably, President Serzh Sarkisian’s Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) described the polls as largely free and fair. ‘Yes, there were some shortcomings, but by and large ballot stuffing, multiple voting and other problems […] were essentially absent today,’ HHK spokesman Eduard Sharmazanov said.

This view was echoed by the CEC, which is dominated by government loyalists. Speaking on public TV, its chairman, Garegin Azarian, said the CEC investigated the opposition allegations and most of them proved false. Armenia’s Office of the Prosecutor-General similarly said it has looked into some of the vote buying claims and found them baseless.

On June 1st ARF Dashnaktsutyun described the elections as deeply flawed and said it will not recognize the legitimacy of their official results. ‘Once again, what happened was more of the same,’ the Dashnaktsutyun leadership said in a statement, alleging widespread vote buying, use of ‘administrative resources’ by the governing parties and voter intimidation by government-connected oligarchs. ‘Unfortunately, our citizens continue to vote by succumbing to administrative pressure from the authorities, vote bribes and demagoguery,’ the statement said. ‘Such elections are [a manifestation] of criminal irresponsibility towards our state, people, and our children’. Dashnaktsutyun’s representative to the CEC Hamlet Abrahamian will therefore not sign the final vote results due later this week. The party at the same time appeared to accept its dramatic election defeat. ‘We are inclined to look for the reasons for Dashnaktsutyun’s reported performance only in our work,’ it said.

European assessment
However, according to the Council of Europe’s observers the elections were largely democratic despite some ‘serious deficiencies.’ The Council of Europe’s Congress of Local and Regional Authorities (CLRAE) deployed the largest international mission, consisting of 12 members, to monitor the polls. They claimed to have visited about half of more than 400 polling stations across Yerevan on election day.

‘The overall organization of the elections has been broadly carried out in compliance with European standards,’ Nigel Mermagen, the British head of the mission, said, presenting the preliminary assessment of the polls. ‘In this respect, the election observation mission of the Congress noted a considerable step forward in comparison to the local elections which took place in Yerevan in September 2008.’

Mermagen did not elaborate on irregularities witnessed by his team members, saying they will be detailed in a final report to be submitted to the CLRAE by October. More importantly, he made clear that CLRAE believes those irregularities did not call into question the legitimacy of the official vote results that gave a landslide victory to President Sarkisian’s HHK.

The initial findings of the observer mission were in sharp contrast to reports by opposition representatives, mass media and Armenian civic groups that monitored the vote. ‘I have a single word for what we experienced yesterday: shock,’ said Amalia Kostanian of the Center for Regional Development (CRD), the Armenian affiliate of the Berlin-based Transparency International. ‘We are shocked. And we are people who have long monitored elections.’

The verdict delivered by the European observers was denounced by HAK’s leader Levon Ter-Petrosian later on Monday. ‘Either they are making fun of us, or they are putting themselves in a ridiculous situation,’ Ter-Petrosian told thousands of supporters rallying in Yerevan.

As Mermagen presented the findings of the Council of Europe observer mission, he was subjected to angry questioning by some of the journalists present at his news conference. One of them pointed out that the May 31 elections saw a record-high number of reported attacks on journalists. ‘That is not of course, strictly speaking, within our competence as an election observation mission,’ Mermagen replied. But, he said, these incidents will be ‘taken into account’ in the preparation of the observers’ final report.

Another journalist, who was reportedly assaulted by government loyalists at a polling station visited by Mermagen, accused the mission chief of being ‘indifferent’ to fraud and violence reports and avoiding conversation with opposition proxies. She even suggested that the observers prejudged the authorities’ handling of the elections even before election day. ‘I am very disappointed by those remarks because certainly I can say they are not true,’ Mermagen said.

Opposition rally in Yerevan
As the HAK planned to hold a massive rally in Yerevan on June 1st, travelling to the city from other parts of Armenia was all but impossible. In what has become a pattern, police set up roadblocks on the highways leading to Yerevan, stopping busses, minibuses and even private cars. One of the roadblock officers claimed that the police are simply searching for weapons and drugs as part of a special operation ordered by the national police chief Alik Sargsian. He denied that transport communication between Yerevan and the rest of the country is seriously restricted ahead of opposition protests.

Meanwhile in Yerevan, the opposition Armenian National Congress (HAK) said it will permanently boycott Yerevan’s newly elected municipal council and never engage in dialogue with the authorities after what its top leader, Levon Ter-Petrosian, called ‘the ugliest election in Armenia’s history.’ The HAK rejected the official results of the elections as fraudulent as it rallied over 10,000 supporters in central Yerevan. Instead, HAK will continue to fight for leadership change in the country.

‘With these elections Serzh Sarkisian has closed the path of dialogue [with the opposition] and the establishment of national solidarity,’ Ter-Petrosian declared. ‘He has burned all the bridges.’ He added: ‘Serzh Sarkisian is not the president of Armenia […] Serzh Sarkisian is an ordinary usurper who must be immediately ousted and put on trial.’ Ter Petrosian also stated that the HAK is ‘officially refusing to engage in any dialogue with Serzh Sarkisian on any condition […] No document signed by Serzh Sarkisian has a legal force for us. Especially if that document applies to Turkish-Armenian relations and the resolution of the Karabakh conflict.’

Ter-Petrosian and his associates have repeatedly stated until now that they will be ready to negotiate with the Sarkisian administration if all opposition members arrested following the February 2008 election are set free. More than 50 of them remain in jail.

Sources: RFE/RL Armenia; Armenia Now; Source photo: Yerevan municipality official website