Campaigning officially began in Nagorno-Karabakh on Tuesday for upcoming parliamentary elections that promise to be more tightly contested than similar polls held in the past.
About 220 candidates mostly representing 7 political parties will be vying for 33 seats in the Karabakh legislature currently controlled by a three-party coalition allied to Bako Sahakian, the unrecognized republic’s president. Sahakian is not affiliated with any political group.
Twenty-two of the parliament seats are up for grabs under the system of proportional representation. The remaining 11 seats will be distributed on May 3 in single-mandate constituencies.
The three governing parties will be looking to retain their solid majority in Karabakh’s outgoing parliament. The largest of them, Free Fatherland, is led by Arayik Harutiunian, the Karabakh prime minister. The two other members of his coalition are parliament speaker Ashot Ghulian’s Democratic Artsakh Party and the local branch of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun).
The government camp is challenged by four other parties. The electoral slate of one of those parties, Movement-88, is topped by Vitaly Balasanian, a retired army general who was Sahakian’s main challenger in the last Karabakh presidential election held in 2012.
According to official results, Balasanian won 32.5 percent of the vote in that election condemned as illegitimate by Azerbaijan. The European Union and some countries, including Georgia and Turkey, also criticized it.
By contrast, U.S., Russian and French diplomats trying to broker a peaceful solution to the Karabakh conflict effectively justified the conduct of the 2012 ballot. They said that although their countries do not recognize the Armenian-populated territory as an independent state they “acknowledge the need for the de facto authorities to try to organize democratically the public life of their population with such a procedure.”
Another major opposition contender, the National Revival Party, is a relative newcomer on the Karabakh political stage. The party founded in 2013 is led by Hayk Khanumian, a 30-year-old activist highly critical of the current Karabakh Armenian leadership. Khanumian supported Balasanian’s presidential bid in 2012.
Speaking in Stepanakert last week, Sahakian, whose second and final presidential term expires next year, urged the election candidates to ensure a “civilized” parliamentary race. “Demagoguery and political hysteria are alien to our people,” the Karabakh leader said. “This specificity has greatly contributed to internal political stability and healthy competition in the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.”
Earlier in March, Balasanian urged the authorities in Stepanakert to “do everything” to ensure the freedom and fairness of the forthcoming elections. They must be much more democratic than Azerbaijan’s next parliamentary elections slated for November, he said.
“This is a historic chance,” the ex-general told RFE/RL’s Armenian service (Azatutyun.am). “Those who will try to commit irregularities with administrative resources and other methods will be thrown into the dustbin of history.”
The U.S. human rights watchdog Freedom House upgraded Karabakh’s status from “not free” to “partly free” after the 2012 presidential ballot described by it as “competitive.” Azerbaijan, on the other hand, remains a “not free” country, according to Freedom House.