ARMENIA: OPPOSITION COALITION FAILS TO MATERIALIZE
Marianna Grigoryan

EurasiaNet
Feb 11 2008
NY

Former president Levon Ter-Petrosian and rival candidate Artur
Baghdasarian have missed a deadline to combine campaigns, apparently
denying the opposition any realistic hope of mounting a serious
challenge for power in Armenia’s February 19 presidential election.

Ter-Petrosian, often presented as the opposition frontrunner, had
earlier announced that he had "serious grounds" to believe that other
opposition forces would join him, an assertion thought to refer
mainly to Baghdasarian, who heads the opposition Orinats Yerkir
(Country of Law) Party. Heritage Party leader Raffi Hovannisian,
who has a sizeable popular following, was also thought to be on the
verge of offering an endorsement. Party representatives now indicate
that they will make a decision by February 12 on which candidate to
support. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

A merger announcement had been expected by February 9, the last day
for candidates to withdraw from Armenia’s presidential race. But the
day came and went without an announcement by either Ter-Petrosian or
Baghdasarian. At a Yerevan rally on February 9, arguably one of the
largest in recent years, thousands of supporters gathered to hear
the former president speak. Police put the turnout at 15,000 people;
organizers at a gargantuan 150,000. "This public rally and magnificent
march have shown that there are indeed no insurmountable obstacles
in front of us," Ter-Petrosian declared at the rally.

The campaign was joined by several organizations tied to the war
in Nagorno-Karabakh, but the topic of a possible alliance with
Baghdasarian and/or Hovannisian was not broached.

The Central Election Commission has finalized the registration for
all previous nine candidates and a sample ballot has already been
sent to the printing house. The Constitutional Court has rejected a
request filed by Ter-Petrosian on February 8 that could have delayed
the elections by two weeks to 40 days. [For background see the Eurasia
Insight archive].

Heritage Party spokesperson Hovsep Khurshudian told EurasiaNet that
negotiations with Ter-Petrosian and Baghdasarian are still ongoing.

Hopes for some form of cooperation still exist, he said.

Senior Heritage Party member Stepan Safarian echoed that view,
asserting that "everything" will be clear by February 12. "We will
have a big discussion inside the party tonight and we will probably
make a decision on that during that discussion and will clarify our
position," Safarian said in reference to a potential partnership with
Ter-Petrosian and/or Baghdasarian.

Political analysts, however, take a dimmer view. With the February
9 deadline past, one observer says, the time for unified campaigns
is gone. Rather, he asserts, Heritage will now have to decide which
campaign it plans to support – Ter-Petrosian or Baghdasarian.

"From the legal point of view, the time for unifications is up,
and even if one of the candidates speaks out about withdrawing his
candidacy in favor of another candidate, it will no longer have
the impact that it would have had before February 9," commented
pro-opposition political analyst Aghasi Yenokian.

Yenokian attributes the failure to agree on a unified campaign to
the ambitions of both candidates and government pressure.

On the evening of February 8, Armenian President Robert Kocharian
called on Baghdasarian, a former government protege, to refrain from
linking his campaign with that of Ter-Petrosian. Doing so, Kocharian
asserted, would cost the onetime parliamentary leader "at least half
of his electorate."

"[T]he electorate of Orinats Yerkir is an electorate which is longing
for stability and is not embittered for the most part. I don’t think
its mood is compatible with that of Levon Ter-Petrosian’s embittered
camp," he said, pointing out that many Orinats Yerkir supporters would
rather vote for Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian than the "discredited"
ex-president.

Baghdasaria n has described as "slander" a report by one Yerevan
newspaper that claimed that he had been invited to Prime Minister
Sarkisian’s summer cottage and offered the post of premier if Sarkisian
is elected and Baghdasarian does not join forces with Ter-Petrosian.

Baghdasarian has largely dodged any clear-cut statement about his talks
with the former president. But he has clearly indicated a reluctance
to play second fiddle to any other candidate.

At a February 11 Yerevan meeting with non-governmental organizations,
he reminded participants that he has "hundreds of thousands of
supporters."

"We discussed both options: Levon Ter-Petrosian joining me, and
our joining him," he said. "I am not struggling for the runner-up’s
position. I am struggling for the post of Armenia’s president. I am
confident that I will be in the runoff. Time will show whether Serzh
Sarkisian or Levon Ter-Petrosian are with me in the second round."

Under Armenia’s election law, a candidate must win an absolute majority
of votes to secure election in the first round of voting.

Nonetheless, Baghdasarian still maintains that "opposition
consolidation" in both rounds is "a political necessity."

Such assertions, notes independent political analyst Yervand Bozoyan,
have put a question mark over the question of opposition unification
from the get-go.

"It is clear to everyone that Levon Ter-Petrosian is an opposition
frontrunner, however, each candidate has his own viewpoint about his
rating and it seems to each of them that he holds the most weight,"
Bozoyan said. "In this case, a conventionally ‘weak’ candidate could
easily join, but not Artur Baghdasarian. There is a question of
serious ambitions here."

The inability of Ter-Petrosian and Baghdasarian to merge campaigns
did not come as a surprise to members of the governing Republican
Party of Armenia. Prime Minister Sarkisian, the odds-on favorite to
the win the presidential vote, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s
Armenian Service that he was "simply sure" that his rivals would not
be able to reconcile their differences. The reason why? "[A]s they
say," noted the prime minister, "we know our customers."