By Mark Dovich
By Mark Dovich
Hayk Marutyan, who served as Yerevan’s mayor from 2018 to 2021, is tipped to regain control of city hall after an opposition party threw its weight behind his candidacy following inconclusive municipal elections earlier this month.
The Mother Armenia bloc, which is supported by former President Robert Kocharyan, said Wednesday its newly elected councilors would support Marutyan’s mayoral bid.
Everything now appears to depend on if the Public Voice party, which is linked to the controversial blogger nicknamed Dog, will do the same.
Together, those two parties and Marutyan’s National Progress party scored 33 seats on Yerevan’s 65-member city council — exactly the minimum number of seats needed to wrest control of the city from Armenia’s ruling Civil Contract party.
The council is set to convene on October 10 to select the city’s next mayor.
What happened at the polls?
Civil Contract lost its majority on Yerevan’s city council in municipal elections on September 17, even while securing the highest vote share of any single party, at about 33%.
Because no one party was able to secure an outright majority, it was not immediately clear who would become Yerevan’s next mayor.
Armenians do not directly elect their mayors. Rather, voters indicate their preferred political party, with council seats distributed proportionally with parties’ vote shares. After the votes are tallied and the new city government convened, councilors select a new mayor from among themselves.
Despite “low voter turnout” and “the misuse of administrative resources by the ruling party,” the elections were “generally considered free and fair, with no major systemic violations observed,” said the European Platform for Democratic Elections, a poll monitoring group.
Fewer than three in 10 eligible voters cast ballots, the lowest figure Yerevan has ever recorded.
Who is Hayk Marutyan?
A former comedic actor, Marutyan led Yerevan from October 2018 to December 2021, when he was ousted from his post in a no-confidence vote put forward by Civil Contract that was widely seen as politically motivated.
It was a stunning turn of events for Marutyan, who was once viewed as one of Nikol Pashinyan’s closest political allies, but broke with the prime minister after Armenia’s disastrous defeat to Azerbaijan in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war.
What does all this mean?
Marutyan’s reelection as mayor would be a defeat for Pashinyan, who personally campaigned for Civil Contract’s candidate in the run-up to the vote.
Despite Civil Contract’s nationwide victory in Armenia’s most recent parliamentary elections in 2021, the years since have seen the party lose a string of highly competitive local elections, including in the country’s second- and third-biggest cities.
Civil Contract may now lose control of Yerevan too.
