Armenian Court Opens Hearings On Appeals Against Election Results

In their separate appeals, they allege serious fraud which they say influenced the results giving victory to the ruling Civil Contract party. The three main opposition contenders accuse election officials of miscounting many ballots and claim that the Armenian authorities forced many public sector employees and security personnel to vote for Civil Contract. They also pointed to mass arrests of their members and supporters, which continued on election day.

The official election runner-up, the Strong Armenia alliance led by billionaire Samvel Karapetian, suggested that the Constitutional Court alternatively order a run-off vote between it and Civil Contract.

According to the Central Election Commission (CEC), Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s party won the elections with 49.8 percent of the vote. Strong Armenia came in second with 23.3 percent, followed by former President Robert Kocharian’s Hayastan alliance (almost 10 percent) and Gagik Tsarukian’s Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK) (almost 4 percent).

The BHK fell just short of a legal threshold for entering the Armenian parliament after the CEC cancelled results in three precincts and refused to rerun elections there. This and other opposition contenders portrayed the controversial decision as further proof that the vote was rigged in the ruling party’s favor.

Also challenging the election results are three other opposition parties that fared worse in the ballot. One of them is led by former human rights ombudsman Arman Tatoyan.

Pashinian and his political allies reject the fraud allegations. They say that the three opposition heavyweights themselves secured hundreds of thousands of votes through illegal vote bribes.

The vote-buying allegations are at the heart of the appeal filed by For the Republic party allied to Pashinian. Representatives of Civil Contract as well as three law-enforcement agencies are expected to echo the allegations during the court hearings.

Opposition leaders seem skeptical about the success of their appeals, mindful of the fact that eight of the court’s nine judges have been installed by Pashinian’s party. The court excluded two of those judges, both of them former pro-government politicians, from the consideration of the appeals, citing their “prejudicial attitude” towards the opposition. It ignored opposition demands to also recuse another judge, Seda Safarian, who ran in the 2021 elections on the ticket of a pro-government bloc that comprised For the Republic.

Under Armenian law, the court must rule on the appeals by July 4.

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