A vote is being cast in the June 7 Armenian parliamentary elections

Opposition Forces Vow to Challenge Election Results

The Central Electoral Commission released new results of Sunday’s parliamentary elections, which slightly differed from the information shared on its website once the preliminary voting tally was complete on Monday morning local time.

The new results still put Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party in the lead with 49.28 percent of the votes, but saw a decline in percentage points for the Prosperous Armenia Party, led by businessman Gagik Tsarukyan, whose party now may not be included as part of the new National Assembly.

Despite its victory, however, Pashinyan and his Civil Contract lacked the two-thirds majority they require to enact certain changes, among them adopting a new constitution, which the prime minister has vowed to do, following demands by President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, who has said that he would not sign a final peace treaty with Armenia if those amendments were not made.

During a press conference on Monday, the CEC chairman, Vahagn Hovakimyan, summed up the results, emphasizing that what was being publicized were the preliminary results. The CEC has until July 3 to announce the final and official results.

“You have all seen the numbers published on our website,” Hovakimyan told reporters. “In fact, they do not include the results of online voting.”

“Furthermore, the percentage calculation that the website system makes is rounded to the nearest hundredth. That is, when you simply add up the numbers published on our website and calculate the percentage from those absolute numbers, you will see that there is a certain difference at the thousandths level,” the CEC chair explained.

Below are the results announced by Hovakimyan.

Number of eligible voters: 2,503,981
Number of voters who participated in the elections online: 410
Total number of voters: 2,507,216
Voter turnout: 1,477 736 (58.94%)
Number of invalid ballots: 17,097.

Hovakimyan then presented the vote tally of the political forces vying for office as follows:
Civil Contract party: 49.825%
Strong Armenia Alliance: 23.281%
“Armenia” Alliance: 9.934%
Prosperous Armenia Party: 3.996%

“The requirement of the electoral code [of Armenia] is that mandates are distributed to those parties, blocs of parties, which in the case of parties that received the sum of the total number of ballots voted in favor and the number of inaccuracies, four percent, in the case of party blocs consisting of up to three parties, eight percent, in the case of party blocs consisting of four or more parties that threshold is 10 percent,” Hovakimyan explained.

These results suggest that the Prosperous Armenia Party does not meet the threshold of entering parliament and only three political forces had cleared the way to membership in the National Assembly. Per the initial results announced earlier, the party had garnered four percent of the votes and would have entered parliament with five seats.

Tsarukyan, the chair of Prosperous Armenia, quickly reacted by demanding a recount of the votes.

The other opposition forces, among them the Strong Armenian Alliance, the Armenia Alliance and the Wings of Unity party, led by Armenia’s former rights defender Arman Tatoyan, also separately demanded a recount, pledging to challenge the election results at Armenia’s Constitutional Court.

Earlier on Monday, a defiant Pashinyan vowed to fight against the opposition forces in parliament.

The prime minister said he and his party have “crushed” their main election challengers, describing them, again, as a “three-headed party of war.” And he again vowed to jail their leaders.

“This will be one of the most important agendas of the political majority and the government, which we must implement without delay and with very decisive steps,” Pashinyan said.

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The Educational Committee of the Crescenta Valley Meher & Satig Der Ohanessian Youth Center on June 18 will host a lecture on “Los Angeles, Beirut and Artsakh: A Diasporic Trajectory,” presented by Ara Oshagan. The presentation will begin at 7:30 p.m. at Crescenta Valley Youth Center, located at 2633 Honolulu Ave., Montrose, CA 91020.

Oshagan will present work from a trilogy of photography-based projects that traverse three locations of critical importance to Armenian communities and to him personally: Los Angeles, Beirut, and Artsakh.

Oshagan was born in Beirut and displaced to Los Angeles as a youth, where he has lived for more than 40 years. His documentary work in Los Angeles seeks to document a diaspora in time and to reassess how we draw the contours of community. Beirut is a complex and fraught return to his youth and a history of war, while Artsakh and the homeland have long occupied Oshagan’s imagination. He has worked there for more than twenty years and is currently engaged in a project with displaced Artsakhtsi communities. His work in these spaces reflects a diasporic state of mind: fractured, complex, full of longing, and layered notions of home.

The artist will present a broad selection of his work and discuss his experiences, as well as the ways these three sites are interconnected and intertwined.

Ara Oshagan is a diasporic trans-disciplinary artist and curator whose practice explores collective and personal histories of displacement, legacies of violence, identity, and (un)imagined futures. Oshagan has published four books of photography. Oshagan is an Artist-in-Residence at the 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica, curator at the City of Glendale and Director of Temporary Exhibitions at the Armenian American Museum in Glendale.

This event is open to public and community members. We look forward to seeing you there.

The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. Attendees are encouraged to reserve the date and time for this important discussion.

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