RULING PARTY SWEEPS VICTORY IN FLAWED YEREVAN ELECTION

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Jun 1, 2009

YEREVAN (Combined Sources) – President Serzh Sarkisian’s Republican
Party of Armenia has swept to a landslide victory in municipal
elections in Yerevan, which the Armenian Revolutionary Federation
and other opposition groups have denounced as flawed.

The Armenian Revolutionary Federation Supreme Council of Armenia
issued an announcement Monday calling the elections "deeply flawed"
and said it would not recognize the results. "We considered the
Yerevan municipal elections as an opportunity for strengthening the
political structure, creating a new government model in the capital,
overcoming the enmity and divisiveness that resulted from the 2008
presidential elections and establishing unity," said the announcement.

"We also believed that fair elections would strengthen the foundations
of democracy in the country and we could prove that we are able to make
progress. Unfortunately, that did not happen," added the announcement.

"Once again, what happened was more of the same. Again, local and
oligarchic clout, bribery and the use of the administrative apparatus
played a role in the elections," asserted the party, adding that
unfortunately, administrative pressure from the authorities, vote
bribes and demagoguery still plague the election process in Armenia.

As such the ARF Supreme Council of Armenia said it would not sign
the final results and urged the authorities to declare the elections
invalid in the precincts that more visibly violated voting procedures.

The Results

The Central Election Commission announced early on June 1 that with all
of the ballots counted, the Republican’s won 47.4 percent of the vote,
enough to reinstall its top candidate, Gagik Beglarian, as Yerevan’s
mayor. The Prosperous Armenia Party, one of the Republican Party’s
two junior partners in the ruling coalition, came in a distant second
with 22.7 percent.

Trailing Prosperous Armenia was the opposition Armenian National
Congress, which the official results showed getting 17.4 percent of
the vote, well below its expectations.

County of Law, the third party represented in Sarkisian’s government,
finished fourth with only 5.2 percent. The Armenian Revolutionary
Federation, which was also part of the governing coalition until
recently received about 4.7 percent, according to the commission.

With the vote threshold for single parties seeking to gain seats
in Yerevan’s Council of Elders set at 7 percent, this means that
neither County of Law nor the ARF will be represented in the new
municipal assembly.

The Central Election Commission put voter turnout at over 53
percent. The highest turnout, more than 65 percent, was registered
in the city’s Malatia-Sebastia district, scene of the largest number
of voting irregularities reported by the Armenian opposition, media,
and independent observers.

The first vote results showing a Republican victory were released at
around midnight following opposition allegations of widespread fraud
during the May 31 voting.

Opposition Complains

Former President Levon Ter-Petrosian’s Armenian National Congress
complained of systemic fraud, vote rigging, and intimidation after
the closure of the polls and announced late Monday that they will
refuse their seats won in the newly elected City Council, effectively
dropping the 65 member City Council to 52 members.

This assessment of the election administration was shared by the
opposition Heritage party as well, which did not contest the vote
but closely monitored its conduct.

"Our assessment is highly negative," Armen Martirosian, Heritage’s
parliamentary leader, told RFE/RL. "We have botched the first election
of the Yerevan council in a disgraceful fashion."

Martirosian decried "widespread" bussing of allegedly bribed voters by
the two main governing parties. He said Heritage has also registered
"many instances of violence" and ballot-box stuffing. "I think the
police performance today was a disaster," he added.

Republicans Say ‘Free and Fair’

For its part, the Republican Party described the polls as largely
free and fair. "Yes, there were some shortcomings, but by and large
ballot stuffing, multiple voting, and other problems that existed
in the electoral process were essentially absent today," said Eduard
Sharmazanov, the Republican spokesman.

This view was echoed by the election commission, which is dominated
by government loyalists. Speaking on state television, its chairman,
Garegin Azarian, said the commission has investigated the opposition
allegations and most of them proved false.

The Prosecutor-General’s Office similarly said it has looked into
some of the vote-buying claims and found them baseless.

President Hails Outcome

President Sarkisian, meanwhile, welcomed the course and official
results of the weekend elections, saying that they marked a "serious
step forward" in the elimination of Armenia’s culture of electoral
fraud.

In a written address to the nation, Sarkisian congratulated the
governing Republican and Prosperous Armenia parties as well as the
opposition Armenian National Congress on gaining seats in Yerevan’s
new municipal council. He also paid tribute to four other parties
that failed to win representation in the council despite conducting
what he described as "quality election campaigns."

"The May 31 elections and the entire pre-election period demonstrated
that we have managed to solve a considerable part of long-standing
problems existing in electoral processes and moved forward in solving
others," said Sarkisian. "As a result, these elections were a truly
serious step forward."

The president further acknowledged violations in "some polling
stations" and said he will seek to ensure that "all the guilty are
identified and strictly punished."

In what may have been a related development, Armenia’s Office of the
Prosecutor-General urged the Central Election Commission (CEC) to
order vote recounts in eight precincts in Yerevan’s Malatia-Sebastia
district, scene of the largest number of fraud instances reported on
election day.

A spokeswoman for the law-enforcement agency, Sona Truzian, told
RFE/RL that the recommendation stems from media reports of ballot
box stuffing reported from the area. "Also, the prosecutor-general
instructed the launch of a criminal case in connection with media
reports on ballot stuffing and violence against journalists and
observers in various Malatia-Sebastia precincts," she said.

Truzian said the moves came despite the absence of any written
election-related complaints lodged with the prosecutors. Opposition
leaders say such complaints are meaningless because of what they see
as law-enforcement bodies’ complicity in vote rigging.

That there were serious problems in Malatia-Sebastia was acknowledged
on Monday by Abram Bakhchagulian, a member of the CEC affiliates
with the ruling Republican Party. But he said it is too early to say
whether they had a serious impact on overall vote results.

Council of Europe Praises

International observers, meanwhile, said the election met European
standards although there were some problems.

"This election was a step forward in comparison with elections held
in September 2008," Nigel Mermagen, head of the Council of Europe
observation mission, told a news conference, Reuters reported.

"Some shortcomings were recorded," he said, adding, however, that
"the overall organization of the elections has been broadly carried
out in compliance with European standards.

The Council of Europe’s Congress of Local and Regional Authorities
(CLRAE) deployed the largest international mission, consisting of
12 members, to monitor the polls. They claimed to have visited about
half of more than 400 polling stations across Yerevan on election day.

Mermagen did not elaborate on irregularities witnessed by members
of his team, saying that they will be detailed in a final election
report to be submitted to the CLRAE by October. More importantly,
he made clear that the Europeans believe those irregularities did
not call into question the legitimacy of the official vote results
that gave a landslide victory to the Republicans.

"They had some influence on the final results but not to the extent
that the legitimacy of the final results was prejudiced, as far as we
could see at this moment in time," said the Council of Europe official.

Major Armenian elections have traditionally been monitored by
hundreds of observers deployed by the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe. The OSCE and its Warsaw-based Office of
Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) did not observe
the Yerevan polls, citing a lack of a formal invitation from the
Armenian authorities.

Local Monitors Cry Foul

The initial findings of the Council of Europe’s observer mission
were in sharp contrast to widespread vote buying and other fraud
reported by opposition representatives, mass media and Armenian
civic groups that monitored the vote. "I have a single word for
what we experienced yesterday: shock," said Amalia Kostanian of the
Center for Regional Development (CRD), the Armenian affiliate of the
Berlin-based Transparency International. "We are shocked. And we are
people who have long monitored elections."

The CRD and the Vanadzor branch of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly
jointly deployed 60 observers in Yerevan’s Malatia-Sebastia district,
one of the main trouble spots during Sunday’s voting. Kostanian said
their detailed election report will be released soon.

As Mermagen presented the largely positive findings of the Council
of Europe observer mission, he was subjected to angry questionings
by some of the journalists present at his news conference. One of
them pointed out that the May 31 elections saw a record-high number
of reported attacks on journalists.

Another journalist, who was reportedly assaulted by government
loyalists at a Malatia-Sebastia polling station visited by Mermagen,
accused the observer mission chief of being "indifferent" to fraud
and violence reports and avoiding conversations with opposition
proxies. She even suggested that the observers prejudged the
authorities’ handling of the elections even before election day.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress