Armenia: With Yerevan Vote, Back to the Future

Any lingering doubt that Raffi Hovhannisian's "hello" ("barev") has now turned into a "good-bye" vanished on May 5, after preliminary official results for Yerevan's city elections gave his Heritage Party a third-place finish with less than nine percent of the vote.

Although many voters and observers contend that the vote, like Armenia's February presidential election, was not crystal-clean, no commentators seem to believe it was an outright opposition victory. The official results left President Serzh Sargsyan's Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) with a robust 55.89 percent of the vote. Billionaire Gagik Tsarukian's Prosperous Armenia Party, a longtime political fence-sitter, tagged behind in second place with just over 23 percent.

Hovhannisian's Heritage Party reportedly plans to demand a recount, but details were not immediately available.

Domestic observers by far outnumbered international monitors, and, perhaps not coincidentally, the number of reports of alleged violations of the election law soared into the hundreds, local monitors iDitord.org and Transparency International Armenia* reported. Many of the usual favorites for funny business -- carousel voting, assisted voting, abuse of administrative resources and bribery -- were among the list. So far, the police have launched three criminal investigations, Kavkazsky Uzel reported.

The vote had been viewed as a chance for some division of power between the Republican Party of Armenia and an opposition group, but, now, the key question is one heard before in Armenian politics -- can the opposition unite?

"Everything will depend further on whether the opposition parties will be able to unite both in parliament and in the Yerevan council in order to oppose somehow [the RPA's] hegemony," Caucasus Institute Director Alexander Iskandarian predicted to Ekho Kavkaza.

If the past is any prelude to the future, don't hold your breath.


*_{iDitord.org received support from the Open Society Assistance Foundation Armenia, part of the network of Open Society Foundations. Transparency International also receives assistance from the Open Society Foundations. EurasiaNet.org works under the auspices of the Open Society Foundations-New York's Central Eurasia Project.}