The party led by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian lost control of the community comprising the formerly industrial town of Alaverdi and over two dozen other towns and villages as a result of local elections held in September 2022. It fell just short of an overall majority in the 27-member local council empowered to appoint the community head.
The opposition Aprelu Yerkir party, which also won 13 council seats, installed its member Arkadi Tamazian as mayor after teaming up with former President Levon Ter-Petrosian’s Armenian National Congress (HAK) party which got only one seat.
Tamazian lost his narrow majority in the Alaverdi council after one of its members representing Aprelu Yerkir defected to Civil Contract in July 2023. Pashinian’s party capitalized on the defection to replace Tamazian by its local leader amid serious procedural violations alleged by the Armenian opposition and some civil society members. Hundreds of police officers were deployed in Alaverdi to help Civil Contract install the new mayor, Davit Ghumashian, in December 2023.
Tamazian and eight other members of his party linked to Ruben Vardanyan, a prominent billionaire and philanthropist jailed by Azerbaijan, have since been boycotting sessions of the Alaverdi council. They maintain that Tamazian’s ouster was illegal.
In a move initiated by Ghumashian, the council’s pro-government majority voted to strip them of their seats. The current mayor and his deputy, Harutiun Dzavarian, said the decision stems from an Armenian law on local government which allows such sanctions for absenteeism.
Under that law, the ousted councilors are to be replaced by nine other people who ran in the 2022 election on the Aprelu Yerkir ticket. Tamazian expressed confidence that none of those candidates will take up his and colleagues’ seats.
In local polls held across Armenia in 2022 and 2021, Civil Contract was also defeated in key urban communities, including Gyumri and Vanadzor the country’s second and third largest cities respectively. Some of those ballots were won by jailed or indicted figures at odds with the government. One of them was set free right after deciding not to become a town mayor.
In Vanadzor, the leader of an opposition bloc, Mamikon Aslanian, was arrested in December 2021 as he was poised to again become mayor. Aslanian spent two and a half years in prison before being sentenced in January this year to four and a half years’ imprisonment on corruption charges denied by him.
In July 2023, two defections allowed Pashinian’s party to unseat the opposition head of another local community encompassing the northwestern town of Akhurian and surrounding villages.