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Eurasia
December 14, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 23
‘Velvet revolutionary’ Pashinian clear victor in Armenia’s general election
bne IntelliNews
The My Step Alliance led by Armenia’s ‘velvet rev- olutionary’ Nikol Pashinian won 70.4% of the vote to win the Armenian parliamentary elections on December 9, according to the country’s Central Election Commission (CEC).
The centrist bloc, which includes Acting Prime Minister Pashinian’s Civil Contract Party, was declared the winner of the poll based on results from all polling stations, the CEC said.
Two moderate opposition parties — Prosperous Armenia led by tycoon and arm-wrestling cham- pion Gagik Tsarukyan, which was part of the previ- ous ruling coalition, and Bright Armenia, a liberal, pro-Western party — received enough votes to clear the 5%-threshold to enter parliament. The Republican Party (HHK), which dominated Arme- nian politics for two decades before the govern- ment was ousted during Armenia’s people power revolution led by former activist and newspaper editor Pashinian in the spring, took just 4.70%
of the vote — it was not clear whether it would nevertheless manage to gain parliamentary rep- resentation in line with constitutional rules that mean 30% of seats in the 101-seat legislature must go to opposition parties.
Armenia's elections have in the past three dec- ades become known for fraud and vote-buying, but there appears to be a lot of optimism that this one will prove to have been different. International observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) were among those monitoring the poll.
Pashinian arrives with his wife and daughters to vote at a polling station in Yerevan.
On the downside in the contest, turnout was low at around 49%. That likely reflected some com- placency among potential voters that Pashin- ian’s bloc was the hot favourite to win and some despondency among remaining HHK voters who realised they were on a hiding to nothing.
Despite the revolution that cleared the way for Pashinian to form a government, parliament re- mained under the control of HHK. Pashinian thus called a snap general election to ensure parlia- ment would shift to representing the new political realities in Armenia.
“Armenian citizens have created a revolutionary majority at the parliament,” Pashinian told report- ers at his bloc’s headquarters after first results were published, news agencies reported.
“If this trend continues, the majority won’t face any problems in implementing legislative chang- es,” he added.
Shortly after casting his ballot, Pashinian said: "After the elections, we will be developing Arme- nian democracy and make an economic revolution happen."
Pashinian, 43, ascended to power promising to fight cronyism, corruption and monopolies and remedy human rights crimes of the past in the small, poor landlocked nation of less than three million people. He has called on members of Ar- menia’s diaspora — assessed by some estimates as numbering more than eight million people — to invest in the homeland’s rejuvenation.