New Armenian Party Requested To Pay Deposit For Yerevan Elections

A newly established political party seeking representation in the Armenian capital’s municipal assembly has been given until Friday afternoon to pay an electoral deposit or be disqualified from the race.

The Arakelutyun (Mission) party is one of six parties and one bloc that have filed for registration of their lists of candidates in the May 5 elections in Yerevan that will also decide the new mayor of the city.

At a meeting on Wednesday, the Central Election Commission (CEC), which is due to make decisions on registrations until the end of this month, said a receipt to prove the payment of an electoral deposit of 3 million drams (about $7,100) required by the election law was missing from the Arakelutyun file.

Failure to make the payment by 2 pm Friday will bar the party from participating in the race, it said.

Hrachya Sargisian, the secretary of the yet little-known political party, who attended the CEC session, said the reason for not attaching the deposit payment receipt to the submitted paper was purely ‘technical’.

A few people seeking to become candidates before last month’s presidential election had not been registered by the CEC due to their failure to pay an electoral deposit of 8 million drams (about $20,000). Some of them protested the norm as undemocratic and took the matter to the Constitutional Court.

The establishment of the Arakelutyun Party was announced still last year, but it was not registered with the Ministry of Justice until early March 2013.

In an interview with RFE/RL’s Armenian Service (Azatutyun.am) the party’s representative strongly denied that Arakelutyun was a protégé of the ruling Republican Party as is alleged by critics.

Sargisian said they considered themselves to be an opposition party with good chances of polling a significant number of votes in the upcoming Yerevan vote.

“Ours will be quite a competitive program as compared to others’,” he said.