Anthony Bowyer
May 29, 2009

The pivotal May 31 council elections in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, have been described as the “second round” of the presidential vote that took place in February of last year. These elections will determine who will be the capital’s next mayor, a powerful position in Armenia. The opposition regards this poll as an opportunity to settle its unfinished business from the 2008 presidential election.

In the 2008 presidential election, the current president Serzh Sargsyan prevailed on the first ballot with 52.8% of the vote, while former president and runner up Levon Ter-Petrosian gained 21.5%. The election was followed by a series of peaceful opposition street demonstrations in Yerevan decrying the results as falsified and inflated, leading to a brutal crackdown by security forces on March 1, 2008 that shook the country to its core. Today, the reverberations of that action are still felt among the citizenry, eroding support for the new regime and souring the notion of elections as a worthy exercise of political expression.

Though a sense of public apathy may pervade the present pre-election period in Yerevan, the spirit of competition has been intense among the seven political parties who have nominated potential mayoral candidates. For post-Soviet countries such as Armenia the post of mayor of the capital city can have major influence on national politics, part of the reason why it is considered to be the country’s most important position after president and prime minister.

The 2009 mayoral election is not a direct election for that post. This has become a source of confusion for many voters and may be serving to dissuade their participation as much as the distrust of how the elections are run. Instead, it is a party list vote, with the top person on the list automatically becoming mayor if the party gains 50% of the total votes. But one curious provision permeates the vote tally: should no party succeed in gaining 50% of the votes, a party which achieves 40% or more votes will be granted a “bonus” as per new rules governing local elections passed by the National Assembly on December 26.

A problem surfaces, however, if a second party also receives 40% or more of the votes, which is more than just theoretically possible. The new election law does not stipulate which party will be given the “bonus” to push them over the top to majority status. The Chairman of the Central Election Commission, Mr. Garegin Azaryan, postulated that the party with the higher percentage of votes should receive the bonus, though his statement carried no official weight. He later backtracked.

The lack of clarity surrounding this law presents a serious problem as Sunday’s poll will most likely be very close. The ruling Republican Party will likely receive 40% of the total vote. If the latest polling numbers are correct, and there is little doubt that polling results in Armenia can vary wildly, Levon Ter-Petrosian’s Armenian National Congress alliance has more than 30% support of Yerevan’s voters and could conceivable push that total past 40%. If both parties win a similar percentage of votes (between 40-50%), there will be no winner and no prevision in determining a winner, leading to more chaos.

In the meantime, the Republican Party’s reliance on the support of its ruling coalition partners the Prosperous Armenia Party has broken down, as evidenced by violent street altercations between party members during the election campaign. Without the support of Prosperous Armenia, the Country of Law Party (Orinats Yerkir) or the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnak) party (the latter of whom withdrew from the ruling coalition last month) who are both fielding their own party lists, it may take a strong push by the Republicans in the remaining days leading up to the election to guarantee a first ballot victory. The alternative option could be more of the malfeasance last seen in Yerevan in February of 2008 in which Sargsyan prevailed in a single round of voting. Such a prospect ill-serves democracy in Armenia and further damages what little credibility remains in the administration of elections in the country.