The Atlantic
Feb 16 2013
Armenia’s Bizarre Campaign Season
By Ruzanna Stepanian and Satenik Vantsian
Disqualifications, hunger strikes and an assassination attempt have
made for a very strange presidential contest.
YEREVAN/GYUMRI, Armenia — A presidential candidate on a four-week
hunger strike. Another candidate who declares he will not accept the
election results — even if he wins. A murky apparent assassination
attempt. Up to one-third of eligible voters legally barred from
casting ballots because they are out of the country. You might think
this would be more than enough to make a presidential election
exciting. But if you are talking about the February 18 vote in
Armenia, you’d be mistaken.
Despite facing a slate of six challengers, incumbent President Serzh
Sarkisian, according to all polls, seems set to cruise to a second
term. Surveys show him winning about 70 percent of the vote, more than
25 percentage points ahead of his nearest rival.
But what the campaign has lacked in suspense it has more than made up
for in strangeness. For instance, candidate Andrias Ghukasian, the
42-year-old owner of a Yerevan radio station, has been on a hunger
strike since the campaign began. He is calling for Sarkisian’s
candidacy to be annulled and for international observers to boycott
the vote. In a sense, he is running against the election itself.
Likewise, 49-year-old Arman Melikian, a former official in the
government of the de facto independent Azerbaijani region of
Nagorno-Karabakh, has denounced the election in advance as
“illegitimate.”
“I will not accept the official results,” he said. “Yes, even if I
win,” he added.
And then there is the story of Paruyr Hairikian, the 63-year-old head
of the Self-Determination Party. He was shot and wounded outside his
home on January 31. After considerable flip-flopping, he decided on
February 10 to ask the Constitutional Court to delay the election for
two weeks. But the next day he withdrew his request, saying that he
couldn’t bear the thought of prolonging Ghukasian’s hunger strike.
Meanwhile, Armenia security forces have arrested two men who
reportedly confessed to shooting Hairikian. And presidential candidate
Vartan Sedrakian, a political neophyte who describes himself as an
expert in Armenian epic poetry, says he fears he will be arrested
because he knew the two suspects and that they had even been hired to
distribute his campaign literature.
Empty Rhetoric
There are serious issues facing this South Caucasus country:
navigating between Russia and the West, tensions with neighboring
Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, a
faltering economy that is dominated by oligarchs and increasingly
dependent on remittances sent from abroad, among others. But such
matters have rarely made it into the campaign, which began on January
21 and has not featured any direct debates among the contenders.
Instead, it has been a campaign of rhetoric and gestures.
One exchange between the U.S.-born former foreign minister, Raffi
Hovannisian, who is Sarkisian’s closest rival, and the incumbent was
typical. Speaking at a rally in Armenia’s second-largest city, Gyumri,
on February 10, Hovannisian presented the choice facing voters in
Manichean, albeit vague, terms: “This is not a struggle between Raffi
and Serzh. This is not a battle between our political parties. It is a
struggle for good, and good will win in the end.” This prompted
Sarkisian to respond at a rally in Yerevan the next day: “Yesterday,
one of the candidates stated the upcoming election was going to be a
choice between good and evil. All the candidates had, until that
moment, been more or less tactful. So have they again begun dividing
the nation into us and them, into good and evil? When will they
realize the country is sick and tired of such divisions?”
A Referendum on Sarkisian
The field of candidates was weakened from the start after some
heavyweights decided not to run. Sixty-eight-year-old former President
Levon Ter-Petrossian, who finished second to Sarkisian in 2008,
stepped aside in December, citing his age as the main reason. His
Armenian National Congress is boycotting the election.
Earlier, millionaire Gagik Tsarukian of the Prosperous Armenia Party,
the country’s second-largest, also said he would not run. Prosperous
Armenia cooperated with Sarkisian’s government in his first term and
performed poorly in the May 2012 legislative elections. The Armenian
Revolutionary Federation also decided to sit out this election,
despite fielding candidates in all of Armenia’s previous presidential
ballots.
Despite praise from monitors who generally say the campaign
environment this time has been better than in previous elections,
opposition figures accuse Sarkisian’s Republican Party of using
“administrative resources” to support the president. In an interview
in January, Sarkisian said it was not the government’s fault that the
opposition is weak and rejected charges of an uneven playing field.
“Of course, it is very difficult for them because members of the
Republican Party today are leaders in more than 70 percent of local
government bodies across Armenia. And no matter how much they say that
this is due to the use of government resources, I can never agree with
that,” Sarkisian said. “People there waged a political struggle and
got into leadership positions. And why shouldn’t they use their
leadership — I mean, their prestige — for their political party or
for ensuring the victory of their party’s leader?”
Will Anyone Vote?
In addition, opposition activists have criticized a change to the
Electoral Code that severely restricted voting from abroad, meaning
that up to 1 million Armenian citizens currently living or traveling
outside the country will be unable to vote. The government says that
change was made because of the high cost of arranging out-of-country
voting, while the opposition charges it was done because voters abroad
historically cast ballots overwhelmingly for opposition candidates.
Although the election is not competitive, Sarkisian is under pressure
to preside over a relatively clean vote. He came to the presidency
following a 2008 campaign that the opposition alleged was flawed. In
the weeks between the election and his inauguration, opposition
protests were violently put down by the authorities and a state of
emergency was declared.
In many ways Sarkisian’s first term has been devoted to establishing
his legitimacy, a process that he hopes will be completed with the
February 18 ballot. But Armenians in general are following the
election-season antics with a mixture of indifference and cynicism.
One pensioner in Gyumri said he wasn’t sure whether he’ll vote or not.
“There have been a lot of promises. But unfortunately they have never
been kept,” he said.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/armenias-bizarre-campaign-season/273233/