YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and his Civil Contract party won Armenia’s weekend parliamentary elections with just under half of the vote, according to their preliminary official results rejected by the two main opposition contenders.
The Central Election Commission (CEC) said Civil Contract garnered 49.8 percent of the vote, enough to extend Pashinyan’s eight-year rule. Billionaire Samvel Karapetyan’s Strong Armenia bloc came in a distant second with 23.3 percent, followed by former President Robert Kocharyan’s Hayastan alliance (almost 10 percent) and businessman Gagik Tsarukyan’s Prosperous Armenia Party (just under 4 percent).
The 14 other parties running in the elections also failed to clear the 4 percent legal threshold for winning seats in the Armenian parliament. The combined 17 percent of votes polled by them and Prosperous Armenia (BHK) will be proportionally distributed, in the form of bonus seats, among the three groups that will be represented in the new National Assembly. Civil Contract will get most of those seats and thus retain its parliamentary majority.
Strong Armenia rejected the official vote tally as fraudulent. A spokeswoman for Karapetyan’s bloc, Marianna Ghahramanyan, accused the authorities of illegally forcing many public sector employees across the country to vote for Civil Contract and alleged many other irregularities on election day.
“In these circumstances, the published figures cannot reflect the real picture,” she wrote on Facebook.
“Strong Armenia’s campaign headquarters is currently busy analyzing the situation and clarifying the true picture of voters’ expression of will, after which we will present our position and further steps,” added Ghahramanyan.
