Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and his Civil Contract party won Armenia’s weekend parliamentary elections with just under half of the vote, according to their preliminary official results released on Monday.
The Central Election Commission (CEC) said Civil Contract garnered 49.8 percent of the vote, enough to extend Pashinian’s eight-year rule. Billionaire Samvel Karapetian’s Strong Armenia bloc came in a distant second with 23.3 percent, followed by former President Robert Kocharian’s Hayastan alliance (almost 10 percent) and businessman Gagik Tsarukian’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 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.
None of the three main opposition forces recognized the official vote tally as legitimate or reacted to them otherwise by Monday noon. Karapetian and other opposition leaders cried foul after Pashinian claimed a “historic victory” overnight when less than one-fifth of the ballots cast were counted by election officials. They accused him of trying to rig the election results through the CEC, which is dominated by his loyalists.
Strong Armenia, Hayastan and Prosperous Armenia alleged numerous irregularities throughout the voting and ballot counting accompanied by continuing arrests of their members or supporters accused of vote buying.
Pashinian declared later on Monday that he and his party have “crushed” their main election challengers again described by him 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,” he said.
Despite its election victory, Pashinian’s party fell short of a two-thirds majority in the parliament, which is required for enacting a new Armenian constitution demanded by Azerbaijan. The constitution drafted by the Armenian Justice Ministry earlier this year needs to be approved by the parliament before being put on a referendum.
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