By Mark Dovich
Armenia’s ruling Civil Contract party faced defeat at the polls in the majority of six municipal elections held on Sunday, including in Gyumri, Armenia’s second largest city. Turnout was low, with only about a third of eligible voters submitting ballots.
The results are a blow to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, whose Civil Contract party secured an unexpected landslide victory in national parliamentary elections in June, widely seen as a referendum on Pashinyan’s handling of the September-November 2020 war in and around Karabakh. The fighting ended in a disastrous defeat for Armenia.
For some cities in the country, Sunday’s elections were the first local elections to use a proportional representation system, whereby voters selected slates of candidates on party lists. While Gyumri, Vanadzor, and Yerevan had previously used this system, other cities had voters choose mayors and city councillors on an individual basis.
Under Armenian electoral law, city council seats are distributed proportionally with parties’ vote shares past a certain, pre-set threshold. In turn, city councillors elect mayors. The set-up effectively means that a city where one party receives the outright majority of votes will be represented by a mayor from that party.
But in cases where no single party is able to secure a majority of votes — relatively common in Armenia’s raucous multiparty system — city councillors must cobble together voting coalitions to select mayors, often involving frantic horse-trading and efforts to jockey for influence.
On Sunday, Civil Contract failed to garner support from the majority of voters in Gyumri, and three other municipalities – Goris, Tatev, and Meghri, all in the southern Syunik region.
In a striking result in the town of Goris, the Arush Arushanyan Alliance, named for and led by the town’s jailed incumbent mayor, cruised to victory with over 60% of the vote. Civil Contract garnered about 35% there, with one minor party also gaining a seat.
Arushanyan was arrested in July on charges of vote-buying that he and his supporters have decried as politically motivated. Although he sits in pretrial detention, his alliance’s comfortable majority in the new town council effectively secures his reelection. He has, so far, not been convicted of any crimes.
In the run-up to the June parliamentary elections, Arushanyan and many other mayors and community leaders in Syunik emerged as vociferous opponents of Pashinyan and threw their weight behind Pashinyan’s main opponent, former President Robert Kocharyan, who led the country from 1998 to 2008.
Syunik has been particularly impacted by the outcome of last year’s war, as it borders broad swaths of territory, previously under Armenian control, that Azerbaijan captured in the course of the fierce fighting.
During the vote in Goris, police officers raided the Arushanyan Alliance’s local headquarters, saying they suspected Gagik Arushanyan, the mayor’s father and campaign manager, of trying to bribe voters. The elder Arushanyan has dismissed claims of vote-buying as false.
The political picture in Gyumri, Meghri, and Tatev, where no single party secured majority support, is far less clear, since new local councils in those municipalities have yet to convene to select new mayors.
In Gyumri, the Samvel Balasanyan Alliance, associated with the city’s current mayor but led by Vardges Samsonyan, one of the Balasanyan’s relatives, garnered about 37% of the vote, with Civil Contract getting roughly 30%.
Three other parties secured a small number of seats on Gyumri’s city council, including the Republican Party, which ruled the country for about two decades before being dislodged from power in the aftermath of the 2018 Velvet Revolution, led by Pashinyan.
In Meghri, Armenia’s southernmost town, the Hanrapetutyun Party received roughly 43% of the vote, while Civil Contract got about 33%. Two minor parties there also overcame the threshold to gain seats on the town council.
In Tatev, Civil Contract garnered roughly 49.9% of the vote — tantalizingly close to a majority, but just short. The Shant Alliance got about 37%, with one minor party also gaining seats.
Meanwhile, Civil Contract received convincing majorities of support in the two other municipalities voting: about 58% in Dilijan, in the northern region of Tavush, and roughly 65% in Tegh, in Syunik.
In Dilijan, which sits less than 40 kilometers from Ijevan, Pashinyan’s hometown, the Civil Contract-allied mayor, Davit Sargsyan, will retain his post.
In Tegh, an amalgamation of seven villages and the most rural of the municipalities that voted Sunday, the Civil Contract-allied mayor, Davit Ghulunts, will also keep his job. Rural areas formed the backbone of support for Civil Contract in June’s country-wide parliamentary election.
The first post-war local elections in Armenia, Sunday’s polls were the first in a wave of municipal elections set to dominate Armenia’s political landscape in the coming months. Three more towns — Ijevan, Kapan, and Stepanavan — will hold elections in November, with polls set to open in December in another 36 municipalities across nine of Armenia’s 10 regions.
