The National Assembly approved relevant amendments to the Armenian Election Code in the first reading only several hours after they were made public by senior deputies representing Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s Civil Contract party. The most important of them stipulates that party alliances running in national or local elections cannot be named after persons.
The amendments were briefly debated under a so-called “urgent procedure” allowing their full passage within just 24 hours. The debate came one week after Karapetian’s Strong Armenia party and two other, little-known opposition parties officially set up an alliance for the elections slated for June 7. They named it Strong Armenia With Samvel Karapetian.
Civil Contract parliamentarians denied any connection between that development and the last-minute change to the Election Code. Their opposition colleagues dismissed those assurances.
Meanwhile, Strong Armenia leaders and activists picketed the parliament building in Yerevan to protest against what they denounced as a government attempt to make it harder for their opposition force to defeat Civil Contract in the elections. Most opinion polls cited by Armenian media in recent weeks suggest that Karapetian and his political team will be the ruling party’s number one challenger.
“This legislation is clearly directed at our political force,” Strong Armenia’s Gohar Meloyan told reporters during the protest.
Another senior party figure, Aram Vartevanian, claimed that the Election Code amendments underline Pashinian’s fears of losing powers. Narek Karapetian, the tycoon’s nephew coordinating Strong Armennia’s activities, echoed that claim in a live Facebook broadcast.
“[Pashinian] is afraid of Samvel Karapetian’s words and name, and is evening fighting against his pictures,” he said.
Karapetian, who has mainly lived in Russia since the early 1990s, decided to enter politics shortly after being arrested in Yerevan last June following his strong criticism of Pashinian’s controversial drive to oust Catholicos Garegin II. The 60-year-old tycoon, who was moved to house arrest in December, rejects all accusations levelled against him as politically motivated.
Karapetian’s team was until now primarily concerned that the Armenian authorities will not allow it to participate in the forthcoming elections. Pashinian’s administration raised those concerns when it asked the European Union late last year to deploy a “hybrid rapid response team” to Armenia after implicitly alleging Russian “hybrid” threats to the integrity of the electoral process. The EU formally agreed to that last month.
The EU sent such a mission to Moldova during parliamentary elections held there last September. Two Moldovan opposition parties deemed pro-Russian were disqualified from the vote won by the former Soviet republic’s pro-Western leadership. Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly warned Yerevan against doing the same when he met with Pashinian at the Kremlin on April 1.