ARMENIAN PRESIDENT SARGSYAN SECURES SECOND TERM IN OFFICE

Journal of Turkish Weekly
Feb 19 2013

YEREVAN — Incumbent Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan has won
Armenia’s presidential election with over 58 percent of the vote,
according to official results announced by the country’s Central
Election Commission (CEC) on Tuesday.

The CEC said tallies from all 1,988 polling stations showed Sargsyan
in the first place with 861,167 or 58.64 percent of the votes followed
by US-born former foreign minister Raffi Hovhannisyan with 539,672
or 36.75 percent of the votes.

Other candidates, including Soviet-era dissident Paruyr Hayrikyan and
former Foreign Minister of the self-declared Nagorno-Karabakh Republic
Arman Melikyan, each garnered less than three percent of the votes.

With voter turnout slightly over 60 percent, or 1,518,000 people,
the current count guarantees Sargsyan a certain victory in the first
round and reelection for the second five-year term in office.

Polling started at 8:00 a.m. and ended at 8:00 p.m. local time on
Monday. Seven candidates ran for the presidency.

Sargsyan, 59, focused his election campaign on populist promises to
fight poverty and unemployment as well as to maintain a tough stance in
Armenia’s long-running disputes with neighboring Turkey and Azerbaijan.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which
monitored the vote, has not yet commented on the alleged violations
during the election campaign and at the polling stations.

Armenian presidential candidate Paruir Hairikyan was shot in the
shoulder last month, in an apparent assassination bid. He initially
asked for a deferral of the vote, but later withdrew his appeal to the
country’s Constitutional Court to postpone the election by two weeks.

19 February 2013

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress