site.btaUPDATED Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's Civil Contract Party Wins Parliamentary Elections in Armenia
At a press conference on Monday morning, the Central Election Commission (CEC) of Armenia announced the preliminary results from Sunday's parliamentary elections from all 2005 polling stations around the country.
The results showed Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's Civil Contract Party won the elections with 49.81% (with 727,160 votes), billionaire Samvel Karapetyan's Strong Armenia Alliance trailed behind with 23.29% (340,062), according to the CEC. Former President Robert Kocharyan's Armenia Alliance was third with some 9.94% (145,097), followed by business tycoon Gagik Tsarukyan's Prosperous Armenia Party, with exactly 4% (58,368), the electoral threshold for a party to enter parliament.
The commission said turnout was 59%, a total of 1,476,916 citizens voted. 2,503,976 are eligible to vote, according to Armenia's electoral register.
At the commission's last press conference on Sunday, CEC Chair Vahagn Hovakimyan announced that the Civil Contract Party leads in electronic voting. "The number of citizens entitled to vote electronically is 537, of which 410 participated in electronic voting, with 22 invalid ballots," he announced. 330 voted for Civil Contract, 13 for Strong Armenia Alliance, and 8 for Armenia Alliance.
On Monday, the CEC announced that Prosperous Armenia Party fell short by 0.004% of the votes needed to enter the country’s next parliament following a recount of the parliamentary election results from Sunday. Thus, three parties will enter the country's legislature.
Hovakimyan noted that the initial data underwent a minor adjustment because it had not previously included the results of electronic voting.
The votes for the four leading political forces are distributed as follows: Civil Contract Party with 49.825%, Strong Armenia with 23.281%, the Armenia Alliance with 9.934%, and the Prosperous Armenia Party with 3.996%.
"In this case, we are dealing with a situation where a single vote could prove decisive for a political party that is very close to the threshold. I would like to point out that these are preliminary results. We are in the process of making corrections and counting the votes, which means we must make every effort to obtain results accurate to the nearest vote. Ideally, the result we obtain should reflect the will of the voters of Armenia," Hovakimyan noted.
Electronic voting in the Armenian elections is available only to citizens working or studying abroad, including diplomats, military personnel on long-term missions, and their family members. Ordinary citizens living abroad must appear in person at polling stations in Armenia.
During the night, Pashinyan declared victory in the parliamentary election after results from just over one-fifth of polling sites showed his party with around 54% of the vote.
In a press conference in the early hours of Monday morning, Pashinyan said his Civil Contract party had prevailed, calling it a "historic victory".
Pashinyan's main contenders in Sunday's parliamentary elections criticized him for declaring victory after the announcement of the first partial preliminary results of the vote.
According to former president Kocharyan, the fact that Pashinyan spoke about winning before the results were announced can be considered pressure on the CEC and usurpation of power. Instead of making threats and giving orders to the judiciary and state bodies without final results, the current regime must bear the legal responsibility for all election violations registered, the gross abuse of administrative resources and the pressure exerted on citizens, Kocharyan said.
Karapetyan, whose party is second, also criticized the Civil Contract Party's declaration of victory as hasty. "They will not achieve the victory they desire, because even from their interviews, from their facial expressions, you can already tell that things are going badly for them. With only 30% of the data [vote counts from 30% of polling stations], they claim to have already won, but you know that 30% is just the results from rural areas. As soon as the results began to be tallied in the cities, the results began to decline very quickly. Therefore, they have resorted to special measures, and we have no idea what they are doing," he said.
/RD/
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