ARMENIA: SPECIFICS OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICS

Abstract

Two rounds of presidential elections, a referendum on amendments to the Constitution and parliamentary elections took place in the republic in the first half of 2003. Foreign observers described both rounds of presidential elections (February-March) as “not corresponding to the international standards and during which unprecedented number of violations took place.” The leader of the Armenian delegation at the PACE A. Gegamian branded the elections as “an anti-constitutional coup.”1 According to the official figures supplied by the Central Election Committee of Armenia, in the second round the incumbent president Robert Kocharian got 67.44% of the votes, while his opponent Stepan Demirchian, leader of the opposition People’s Party, 32.56%. Having studied the results, the Constitu-tional Court recognized Kocharian as the newly elected president but recommended the National Assem-bly to carry out a referendum on confidence in the authorities within the next 12 months. While comment-ing on this decision, Chairman of the Constitutional Court G. Arutiunian explained that the referendum would help overcome social confrontation and confirm the legitimacy of Kocharian’s second presidency.
 The parliamentary elections in May 2003 attracted more critical salvoes from Western countries:
he PACE and OSCE missions detected considerable violations of the vote counting procedure. Their joint statement said, in particular, that in certain key aspects these elections failed to comply with the international democratic standards: votes were bought while the voters had no faith in the election committees’
Honesty. As a result, according to the document, big businessmen won a large number of seats; many of them secured voters’ support with services, money and commodities. The observers pointed out, however, that the parliamentary elections were much better organized and received much wider media coverage than the presidential elections.
 These elections sent up political tension inside the country and damaged its image outside it. The turnout was the lowest in recent history; all political forces were caught at numerous abuses. This is all explained by the difficult and tortuous process of the emergence of civil society in the country (typical of all post-Soviet states).
 Armenia inherited from the past inadequately developed democratic institutions—one should not expect that they, and the democratic development level, would reach the European standards in the near future. While analyzing the election campaigns we should bear in mind that the country is still trying to move away from an authoritarian to a Western type of democratic system. As soon as we accept this, we shall be able to register obvious positive shifts in the desired direction.
 R. Mirzakhanian, Chairman of the Ramkavar Azatakan Party of Armenia (RAPA), was very objective in his assessment of the elections and the political events that followed: “There were falsifications, yet they were not massive enough to distort the results. One more thing: in the past it was mainly the authorities that falsified elections and were engaged in other illegal deeds. This time we saw the so-calledopposition doing the same even on a broader scale. There is no justification for those who were trying to upset the balance in the republic. In fact, this played into the hands of those outside forces who did not want a peaceful settlement in Karabakh, who were doing their best to build up tension around the republic and who insisted that democracy in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia was at the same level. This is not true. Indeed, who is fond of quoting irresponsible statements of the so-called heroes of our rallies and manifestations? The Turkish and Azerbaijani press and their loyal disciples and followers by which I mean certain Armenian newspapers.”