A 41-year-old comedian allied to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian took over as mayor of Yerevan on Wednesday at the inaugural session of the new city council elected late last month.
Hayk Marutian topped the list of candidates of Pashinian’s My Step alliance which won over 80 percent of the vote in municipal elections held on September 23. The landslide victory earned it 57 of the 65 seats in the council.
Under Armenian law, the top candidate of a party or bloc gaining an outright majority in the municipal legislature automatically becomes Yerevan mayor. Marutian will be officially sworn in on Saturday.
“We have a historic opportunity to make our long-standing dreams come true,” the new mayor told the council.
“I am confident that with this composition of the Council of Elders we will make sure that our fellow Yerevan residents smile every day, every hour, every second,” he said.
Armenia - Members of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian's My Step alliance vote at the inaugural session of Yerevan's municipal council, 10 October 2018.
Nicknamed “Kargin Hayko,” Marutian is famous for his performances in popular comedy shows aired by Armenian TV channels. He has also produced his own shows and films in the past several years.
A strong backer of Pashinian, Marutian actively participated in mass protests in April and May that brought down Armenia’s former government headed by Serzh Sarkisian.
Marutian’s predecessor, Taron Markarian, is a senior member of Sarkisian’s Republican Party of Armenia (HHK). Markarian, in office since 2011, resigned in July under pressure from Pashinian’s government.
The HHK majority in the previous city council decided not to appoint another Republican mayor, paving the way for the September 23 elections. The former ruling party did not participate in them.
Speaking to reporters, Marutian seemed to rule out staff purges within the municipal administration which Pashinian and his allies have for years accused of corruption. He said he will not fire “professionals willing to work under the rules of new Armenia.”
“If people are ready to serve, if they have no problems with the law, I am ready to work with those who can be of use,” he said.
Commenting on his immediate tasks, Marutian said: “First of all, we need to solve the problem of garbage collection and then step by step switch to other issues which we presented in our campaign manifesto.”
Armenia - Commuter minibuses are parked on a street during a public transport strike in Yerevan, 16 January 2018.
The new mayor also faces the daunting task of overhauling the Armenian capital’s outdated system of public transportation, a key source of complains from Yerevan residents.
Ever since the mid-1990s, the system has been dominated by minibuses belonging to private companies, many of them owned by government-linked individuals or even government officials themselves. Few of them have invested in their fleet of aging vehicles in the past decade. The minibuses as well as a smaller number of buses provided by the municipality have become even more overcrowded as a result.
A British consulting firm contracted by the municipality submitted last year detailed recommendations on how to revamp the transport network. Former Mayor Markarian’s administration essentially accepted them, pledging to replace the battered minibuses with new and larger buses by the end of 2018.
One of Markarian’s deputies said in August 2017 that the long-awaited change will require as much as $100 million in investments, a sum equivalent to almost 57 percent of the entire municipal budget. He said the municipal authorities hope to attract a “foreign investor” that would run the new network and foot the bill.
Marutian said that he and his aides will look into the British firm’s proposals. If they are deemed realistic and free of “corruption risks” the new mayor’s office will be ready to implement them, he added.