Monsters and Critics.com
Feb 19 2008
Polls open in Armenian presidential elections
Feb 19, 2008, 12:51 GMT
Yerevan, Armenia – Polls opened across Armenia Tuesday morning in an
election that is as much a judgment of outgoing President Robert
Kocharian’s decade at the helm of the small Caucasus state as they
are about electing a successor.
While Kocharian’s preferred successor, Prime Minister Serzh
Sarkisian, 53, led in pre-election surveys, there were strong
questions about whether he would be able to win a first round
outright for which he would need more than 50 per cent of the vote.
Armenia’s current construction boom and steady growth in recent years
speak for the powerful prime minister, whose party swept recent
parliamentary elections in the country.
Speaking to journalists after casting his ballot Tuesday, Sarkisian
said, ‘The government was formed nine months ago, and we have since
then achieved good results. I do not know of any need for essential
changes.’
Kocharian, who voted minutes before at the same polling stations,
underlined, ‘Each elections is a test which will leave us stronger. I
would like everything to be decided in the first round.’
‘I voted for the stability and growth of Armenia. We are registering
a very important progress,’ the president added.
His words were echoed by voters outside polling stations in the
capital on Tuesday.
Vladimir, a 75-year-old pensioner, said simply he was voting to ‘keep
the old power, to keep stability,’ while Arar, an architect in his
thirties, pointed to cranes overhanging the street and said ‘the
country is growing.’
The most prominent challenge comes from Armenia’s first president,
Levon Ter-Petrosian, 63, who made a dramatic comeback from hermetic
retirement as a widely unpopular leader associated with the country’s
post-Soviet economic collapse.
‘We will fight to the end,’ Ter-Petrosian said Tuesday, repeating the
phrase from his campaign speech Saturday that drew about 30,000 to
Yerevan’s theatre square.
‘Many dirty things are happening. There have been many violations in
this election,’ the former president said after voting Tuesday.
Ter-Petrosian has already called a mass meeting on Wednesday, raising
fears of post-election unrest in the streets. Students in Yerevan
announced last minute closures at their universities Wednesday.
Despite progress, over a quarter of Armenians live below the poverty
line and widespread perceptions of corruption dog the top candidates.
‘Our choice is between bad and worse,’ was a phrased repeated by
voters on election day.
Former parliamentary speaker Artur Baghdasarian, a 39-year-old
populist politician calling for Armenia’s accession to the EU and
NATO, is expected to finish second in the polls with about 20 per
cent of the vote.
In all, nine candidates appear on Tuesday’s ballot.
But in the battle between Kocharian’s predecessor and successor, the
frozen conflict with neighbouring Azerbaijan over the territory of
Nagorno-Karabakh has emerged as the most sensitive issue.
Ter-Petrosian maintains the conciliatory stand that was the main
cause of his resignation in 1998 at the end of a full-scale, six-year
war, while war hero Sarkisian has upheld Kocharian’s hawkish stance.
The government candidate sees the country’s foreign policy as being
closely tied to Moscow, which lends him its backing.
Armenia has been pushed to look for allies out of the region, facing
blockades along its border with Azerbaijan and Turkey, which rejects
Yerevan’s lobbying for international recognition of the killings of
Armenians by the Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1915 as genocide.
The small Caucasus state of 2.3 million has emerged as strategically
important, lying along gas routed from the energy-rich Caspian Sea
region to Europe and a close partner of Iran. Western powers fear
that tensions along its border could disrupt gas routes.
Three hours after polling stations opened at 800 (400 GMT), 11.2 per
cent of voters had cast their ballot.
The voting will last 12 hours and the first official results are
expected from midnight. A new election law passed last year forbids
voting by Armenian nationals living abroad.
The United States, meanwhile, has threatened to withhold 235 million
dollars in aid, while further diplomatic relations with the European
Union may be contingent on the fairness of Tuesday’s vote, which will
be monitored by 620 international observers.
Opposition candidates have criticized Sarkisian for abusing his
government post to secure television coverage and blanket advertising
across the country.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s vote
monitoring mission is to deliver its assessment on Wednesday
afternoon.