Voters in Armenia cast ballots on Sunday in snap parliamentary elections held more than seven months after mass protests that brought down the country’s former government.
The My Step alliance of Nikol Pashinian, the protest leader who became prime minister in May, was widely expected to win the elections by a landslide. It was challenged by ten other political forces, including the Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) headed by Serzh Sarkisian, Pashinian’s deposed predecessor.
Sarkisian chose not to run for the parliament, leaving it to his former top aide, Vigen Sargsian, to head the HHK’s list of candidates.
Among other major election contenders were businessman Gagik Tsarukian’s Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK) and the Bright Armenia party that was until recently allied to Pashinian.
The 11 groups were vying for at least 101 seats in the National Assembly distributed under a complex system of proportional representation. Armenians voted for not only a party or bloc but also their individual candidates running in nationwide constituencies.
Armenia - Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian votes at a polling station in Yerevan, December 9, 2018.
The parties have to win at least 5 percent of the vote in order to be represented in the new parliament. The legal vote threshold for alliances is set at 7 percent.
Shortly after the more than 2,000 polling stations across Armenia opened early in the morning Pashinian urged voters to brave a rainy and snowy weather and turn out in large numbers. In a live Facebook address aired a few hours later, he expressed concern at early signs that turnout is lower than it was in the last legislative elections held in 2017.
Speaking to reporters outside at a polling station in Yerevan, Pashinian implied that he expects My Step to win a comfortable parliament majority. He dismissed suggestions that its landslide victory and weak opposition presence in the legislature would not bode well Armenia’s democratization.
“This is what democracy is all about,” he said. “The people decide who should be in power and who shouldn’t.”
“Democracy is our general goal and I think we have achieved our goal,” declared Pashinian.
The HHK’s Sargsian also called for high voter turnout after casting a ballot elsewhere in Yerevan. “The last thing one can do today is to stay at home,” he said. “One must turn out … and consciously vote for the political force with which you associate the country’s future, whether it’s the incumbent government or a force acting as its counterweight.”
“My second expectation is that we will have a more consolidated society at the end of the day,” added the former defense minister.
Sargsian, whose party had for years been accused of rigging elections and buying votes, also expressed hope that the official election results will be “acceptable to everyone.”
Armenia - Former President Serzh Sarkisian arrives at a polling station in Dzoraghbyur to vote in parliamentary elections ,9Dec2018
Serzh Sarkisian, who ruled Armenia from 2008-2018, voted early in the afternoon at a Yerevan school gym turned into a polling place. He smiled and joked with some election officials there. The 64-year-old former president, who has kept a very low profile since his resignation in April, refused to answer any questions from journalists.
Meanwhile, Tsarukian called on Armenian parties to stop “slinging mud at each other” and to focus on concrete solutions to the country’s problems. “If we want things to get better, we must be united,” the tycoon told reporters outside a polling station in a village just outside Yerevan where he was born and lives.
Pashinian last month pledged to ensure that the December 9 elections are the most democratic in Armenia’s history. He instructed law-enforcement to crack down hard on anyone who would try to buy votes or exert undue pressure on voters.
The chief of the Armenian police, Valeri Osipian, issued corresponding warnings to election candidates when he toured various parts of the country in the run-up to the vote.
Osipian said on Sunday that other police officers also took “preventive” measures against fraud and vote buying during the election campaign. “I think they did a very good job,” he said after voting for a “good Armenia.”
HHK leaders said during the campaign that in some parts of the country police officials are summoning HHK activists and trying to intimidate them. The police denied that.
The HHK as well as some BHK representatives have also accused Pashinian’s bloc of abusing its administrative resources. In particular, they have claimed that Armenia’s provincial governors have pressured town and village mayors to earn My Step many votes.
Pashinian dismissed the allegations, saying that the governors, almost all of them running for the parliament on the My Step ticket, conducted their election campaigns in a lawful manner. He insisted that the elections are “really, free transparent and democratic.”
According to the Central Election Commission (CEC), the polls were monitored by over 500 foreign observers. Most of them were deployed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.