The Republic of Armenia
held Presidential elections on Tuesday, February 19 and Serge Sarkisian was
elected as the third President of
Armenia, garnering 52.8% of the popular vote.
His main opponent Levon Ter-Petrosian won an estimated 21.5%, according to the Central
Election
Commission. 1.6 million voters cast their ballots- about 70% of the
eligible voters.
Sarkisian was Prime
Minister of Armenia and an ally
of President Robert Kocharian. He is also head
of the Republican party of Armenia. Sarkisian is from the region of Karabakh,
an ethnic
Armenian enclave that broke away from Azerbaijan in a bloody war in
the early 1990s. A former head of the Karabagh army, Sarkisian
has held key
posts in the Armenian government, including as head of the Ministry of Interior
and Defense Minister.
Ter-Petrosian accused
the
authorities of resorting to ballot-stuffing, vote-buying, and beating his
activists who monitored the election. He asserted that
he was actually the
winner.
“These figures have nothing
to do with reality, we are overwhelmingly ahead of them,” his spokesman, Arman
Museian,
said of the results announced by the election commission.
Since February 19, tens of
thousands of supporters of Ter-Petrosian have been
holding daily rallies in
Armenia’s capital of Yerevan, to protest against what they see as massive vote
rigging and to demand a re-run
of the vote. The Armenian authorities have
responded to the protests by arresting at least three opposition leaders and
threatening
to use force against the demonstrators.
An influential
international observer mission said there were concerns about the vote count,
but
issued a generally positive assessment of the election.
The election was “mostly in
line with the country’s international commitments,
although further
improvements are necessary,” the mission from the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe said in a preliminary
statement.
The vote had shaped up as a
two-horse race between Prime Minister Sarkisian, and Levon Ter-Petrosian, the
former Armenian
president forced to resign by Kocharian and Sarkisian almost a
decade ago. The two rival camps fought a tough electoral battle, having
already
traded bitter accusations over their government records.
Ter-Petrosian, 63, was
Armenia’s president from 1991 until his resignation
in 1998. He broke 10 years
of silence last year to announce his comeback bid for the presidency.
Ter-Petrosian has called for a more
conciliatory approach with neighbors
Azerbaijan and Turkey, both of which have cut diplomatic ties and sealed their
borders with Armenia.
Ter-Petrosian
was elected
leader of Soviet Armenia in 1990, shortly before its independence. He was
elected the country’s first post-Soviet president
in 1991 and re-elected in
1996, before he was forced to step down in 1998 for advocating concessions with
Azerbaijan over Karabakh.
A
total of 12 candidates
initially announced plans to run for President, and nine succeeded in doing so.
U.S.-born former Foreign Minister
and Zharangutiun [Heritage] party
Chairman Raffi Hovannisian was denied registration on the grounds that he
acquired Armenian citizenship
only in 2001; Armenia’s election law stipulates
that presidential candidates must have been citizens of the Republic of Armenia
for
a minimum of 10 years prior to the ballot. Zharangutiun subsequently
declined to throw its support behind another candidate. Nor Zhamanakner
[New
Times] party leader Aram Karapetian was similarly denied registration as
he has not lived permanently in Armenia for the past decade.
No explanation was
given as to why that requirement did not render him ineligible to register for
the 2003 presidential election, in
which he polled fourth with 2.95 percent of
the vote.
Two other major candidates
vied for the open position.
Artur Baghdasarian, 39,
is
a former speaker of parliament who fell out with the government and joined the
opposition. He received 16.67% of the vote to come
in third. His Orinats
Erkir [Rule of Law] party won nine seats in the 131-seat National Assembly
in May’s parliamentary elections, the
most of any opposition party. A former
chairman of the French University in Armenia, Baghdasarian was seen as more
pro-Western than
the current government, which has fostered strong ties with
Moscow. Baghdasarian was first elected to parliament in 1995. Re-elected
in
1999 and 2003, he was the influential speaker from 2003 to 2006, when he was
ousted for criticizing the authorities.
Vahan Hovhannesian,
41, is
the deputy speaker of the Armenian parliament and the candidate of the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation (ARF), one of Armenia’s
oldest political parties. He
received 6.8% of the vote. Born in Yerevan, Hovannisian is a historian and
archaeologist who was first
elected to parliament in 1999. The party was banned
in the early 1990s for an alleged plot to overthrow the government, but was a
member
of Kocharian’s governing coalition from 1998 until last year. It won 16
seats in May’s parliamentary elections and while not a member
of the current
coalition, continues to support the government.
The Armenian Studies Program web page is sponsored by a grant from
The Bertha and John Garabedian Charitable
Foundation, Fresno.