U.S.-BORN POLITICIAN RESHAPES ARMENIAN OPPOSITION CAMP
By Emil Danielyan
Eurasia Daily Monitor, DC
(Aravot, June 23; Hayots Ashkhar, June 13; 168 Zham, June 12)
June 26 2007
The May 12 parliamentary elections in Armenia, swept by political
allies of President Robert Kocharian and Prime Minister Serge
Sarkisian, were a massive blow to the country’s fragmented
opposition. Most of its top leaders, including the two men who had
nearly unseated Kocharian in the last presidential ballot, failed to
win a single parliamentary seat and are now facing political oblivion.
To add insult to injury, Western election observers described the
elections as largely democratic, essentially legitimizing their
outcome. Opposition allegations of vote manipulation rang hollow
in these circumstances, even if they were echoed by local media and
observer reports. The Western stamp of approval demoralized even the
most radical of the Armenian oppositionists, who had pledged to use
the vote in another attempt at an anti-government "revolution."
Little wonder then that their post-election rallies in Yerevan were
poorly attended and quickly ran out of steam.
But amid the overall doom and gloom there was one opposition
politician who had something to celebrate. Raffi Hovannisian, a former
U.S. citizen who had served as independent Armenia’s first foreign
minister, made a much stronger showing than the more experienced
opposition heavyweights. His Heritage party got almost 6% of the vote
and earned seven seats in the National Assembly, becoming one of only
two opposition groups represented in the 131-member legislature.
Heritage did particularly well in Yerevan, home to at least one-third
of the electorate, winning over 13% of votes cast under the system of
proportional representation, according to the government-controlled
Central Election Commission (CEC). The CEC figures showed it garnering
less than 3% in the rest of the country. The sharp disparity between
the Heritage performance in and outside the Armenian capital was one
of the most suspicious things about the official vote results. Even
in Yerevan, Hovannisian’s party looked set to do even better shortly
after the closure of polls on May 12.
Early returns reported by some Armenian TV channels put it in second
place behind Sarkisian’s Republican Party in electoral precincts
across the city. In the event, the party barely cleared the 5% vote
threshold for entering the parliament under the proportional system.
Not surprisingly, Hovannisian and his associates accused the
authorities of stealing two-thirds of the votes cast for Heritage.
Still, they chose to accept the parliamentary mandates allotted to them
and not to boycott parliament sessions after Armenia’s Constitutional
Court rejected opposition demands to invalidate the elections in early
June. Hovannisian made it clear that he is ready for "horizontal
cooperation" with the parliamentary majority, expressing hope that
it will help to pass bills drafted by Heritage.
Hovannisian’s relative electoral success is widely attributed to an
enduring, if inexplicable, public sympathy that the 47-year-old has
developed ever since moving to Armenia from California in 1990. In
late 1991, he was appointed by then president Levon Ter-Petrosian as
foreign minister to oversee the newly independent country’s accession
to international organizations and first diplomatic contacts with
major world powers. Less than a year later he was unexpectedly sacked
after delivering a speech in Istanbul that Ter-Petrosian found too
emotional and hard-line. Many Armenians, increasingly disillusioned
with their first post-communist leadership, found the move unjust.
They increasingly began to associate Hovannisian with honesty and
personal integrity, even though the ever-smiling mustachioed lawyer
kept a low profile for the next ten years.
Hovannisian was among the prominent individuals who rallied behind
Kocharian after the latter came to power in 1998. But he eventually
fell out with the new president as well. Like Ter-Petrosian, Kocharian
was not in a hurry to grant him Armenian citizenship for obviously
political motives. Hovannisian got an Armenian passport only in 2001,
which disqualified him from presidential election of 2003. (The
Armenian constitution requires presidential candidates to have been
citizens of and permanently resided in the country for at least ten
years preceding an election. Hovannisian will also be unable to contest
the next presidential election due in early 2008 for the same reason.)
Hovannisian joined Kocharian’s main opposition challenger, Stepan
Demirchian, in rejecting the official outcome of that election. The
Heritage leader burned the last remaining bridges with Kocharian with
a December 2005 open letter in which he effectively implicated the
Armenian leader in electoral fraud and even political killings. A
few months later his party was controversially forced out of its
state-owned offices in Yerevan. The party unsuccessfully challenged
the politically motivated eviction in the court.
The dispute is still not over, with the Heritage leadership alleging
that government agents illegally accessed the opposition party’s
computer database and downloaded confidential information about its
members and activities. The authorities have repeatedly denied the
claims. Still, on June 22 a Yerevan court ordered state prosecutors to
launch a criminal investigation into what Hovannisian has termed the
"Armenian Watergate" scandal.
Armenians disaffected with the government voted for Heritage in
large numbers despite the vagueness of its leader’s discourse. His
pre-election speeches were largely made up of convoluted references to
patriotism, freedom, and rule of law. The lack of specifics appears to
have been offset by Hovannisian’s image as a "nice guy" and his casual
U.S. style of campaigning. In the confusing abundance of opposition
contenders, many disgruntled voters found him refreshing and more
credible than established leaders like Demirchian.
Despite the election debacle, some of those oppositionists now plan
to run for president and will be keen to be endorsed by Hovannisian,
who will almost certainly be again barred from the contesting the 2008
election. But whether Hovannisian will throw his weight behind any
of them or declare that a presidential election held in his absence
is illegitimate is an open question.