Armenia: Rivals Up The Stakes
Two main contenders in presidential poll claim that government employees are on their side.
Armenia: Rivals Up The Stakes
Two main contenders in presidential poll claim that government employees are on their side.
As the Armenian presidential contest heads towards the finishing line, tensions are rising between supporters of the two leading candidates, while the intentions of many voters remain unclear.
The official candidate, Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian, and the man generally seen as his principal rival, former president Levon Ter-Petrosian, are engaged in a contest of wills, each claiming that the public is behind him.
Ter-Petrosian’s supporters have sought to undermine confidence in the Sarkisian camp by claiming that many government officials are on their side, while accusing the administration of pressuring employees to back its favoured candidate.
It is difficult to judge what people’s real voting intentions are.
During a Ter-Petrosian rally in Yerevan on February 9, IWPR asked two men and a woman standing to one side whether they supported the former president. “We aren’t for anyone, we just came to look and listen,” replied one of them.
A few minutes later, they became less hesitant and volunteered the information that in the district administration offices where they work, their bosses noted down their passport details and instructed them to vote for the government’s candidate or face losing their jobs.
“How can we vote freely after that?” asked the woman.
A member of staff at Armenia’s institute of archaeology and ethnography said many people were choosing to keep their views to themselves for fear of suffering the consequences.
“If people are asked, they may say that they are supporting the official candidate whereas in actual fact they may support the other candidate, Levon Ter-Petrosian,” she said. “There is undoubtedly fear, especially among people who have a business or a state-sector job.”
Ahead of the February 19 ballot, several opinion polls suggest that Sarkisian has a commanding lead over his two main opponents, Ter-Petrosian and former speaker of parliament Artur Baghdasarian. Supporters of the two latter candidates say that the pollsters are not neutral, and that voters are afraid to express their real views.
The Ter-Petrosian campaign team says between 80 and 100 people have suffered intimidation or lost their jobs for supporting the former president, and is compiling a list of names of people who have been punished in this fashion. These figures have not been confirmed independently.
The authorities strongly deny these charges.
“We need only transparent elections that are fair and inspire confidence,” said Sarkisian, answering questions in parliament.
In the northern Lori region of Armenia, the governor heads the pro-government Republican Party but is allowing staff working under him to support the opposition.
Arman Musinian, Ter-Petrosian’s press secretary, said that this was a rare exception to the general rule.
“There are some honest leaders within the state system who understand that people have the right to express their will and make a free choice,” said Musinian.
Musinian said the Ter-Petrosian campaign headquarters constantly gets visits from people who work for the government, both in national ministries and local administrations.
“Sometimes these are high-ranking people,” he said. “They ask for CDs or other materials, and even offer their help, but they try to do it surreptitiously because they are afraid of losing their jobs. These people run into not thousands but tens of thousands.”
Ter-Petrosian has used his position as the first president of independent Armenia to target state-sector employees.
In the first press conference he gave in the election campaign, he predicted that the whole “state pyramid” would collapse in the run-up to the vote. His supporters also predicted that he would win public backing from some state officials.
Ter-Petrosian has won some support from other political forces, for example the Heritage Party of former foreign minister Raffi Hovannisian and the New Times party of Aram Karapetyan.
He has also been backed by some senior members of the Yerkrapah Union, Armenia’s largest veterans’ organisation. It too has close ties to the government and the Republican Party. Ter-Petrosian was publicly endorsed by the party’s branch in the northwestern region of Shirak during a rally in the regional centre Gyumri.
His candidacy has in addition been endorsed by Test of Spirit, an influential organisation uniting veterans of the Karabakh war. The group is led by Sasun Mikaelian and Hakob Hakobian, both of them members of the ruling Republican faction in parliament.
“We stand by our commander-in-chief with whom we waged and won the fight for freedom in Artsakh [Karabakh],” Mikaelian told a rally. “We are loyal to him.”
The Republican party said on February 11 that the decision by Mikaelian and Hakobian to back Ter-Petrosian was not a sign of serious cracks emerging in the Sarkisian camp.
“We are not worried about mass defections because our team is very strong, very stable, very powerful and you will see that once again on February 19,” party spokesman Eduard Sharmazanov told the A1plus news website. “The behaviour of one or two party members cannot be attributed to the whole party.”
There were some press reports that 300 members of the pro-government Prosperous Armenia party had teamed up with Ter-Petrosian. However, there has been no public declaration to this effect, and party spokesman Baghdasar Mherian said only one person had left his party in recent times, and that was for reasons that had nothing to do with politics.
Samvel Nikoyan, spokesman for the Republican Party, said predictions that the Ter-Petrosyan camp would draw off support from pro-government forces had been proven empty.
“Time has shown that everything that was said was a propaganda instrument, mere wishful thinking,” said Nikoyan.
Larisa Alaverdian, a former human rights ombudsman who now represents the Heritage Party in parliament, insists voters must be courageous enough to make up their own minds who they want to vote for on election day.
“If we want to build a law-based state, then we need to drive the slave out of ourselves,” she said. “It ought to be a matter of pride for the state system if it contains people with different points of view. Such viewpoints shouldn’t be reduced to ‘I love you’ or ‘I don’t love you’, but should be articulated in a more civilised manner.”
Naira Melkumian is a freelance journalist in Yerevan. Naira Bulghadaryan, correspondent for ArmeniaNow Online and the Civil Initiative Newspaper in Vanadzor, also contributed to this article.
The official candidate, Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian, and the man generally seen as his principal rival, former president Levon Ter-Petrosian, are engaged in a contest of wills, each claiming that the public is behind him.
Ter-Petrosian’s supporters have sought to undermine confidence in the Sarkisian camp by claiming that many government officials are on their side, while accusing the administration of pressuring employees to back its favoured candidate.
It is difficult to judge what people’s real voting intentions are.
During a Ter-Petrosian rally in Yerevan on February 9, IWPR asked two men and a woman standing to one side whether they supported the former president. “We aren’t for anyone, we just came to look and listen,” replied one of them.
A few minutes later, they became less hesitant and volunteered the information that in the district administration offices where they work, their bosses noted down their passport details and instructed them to vote for the government’s candidate or face losing their jobs.
“How can we vote freely after that?” asked the woman.
A member of staff at Armenia’s institute of archaeology and ethnography said many people were choosing to keep their views to themselves for fear of suffering the consequences.
“If people are asked, they may say that they are supporting the official candidate whereas in actual fact they may support the other candidate, Levon Ter-Petrosian,” she said. “There is undoubtedly fear, especially among people who have a business or a state-sector job.”
Ahead of the February 19 ballot, several opinion polls suggest that Sarkisian has a commanding lead over his two main opponents, Ter-Petrosian and former speaker of parliament Artur Baghdasarian. Supporters of the two latter candidates say that the pollsters are not neutral, and that voters are afraid to express their real views.
The Ter-Petrosian campaign team says between 80 and 100 people have suffered intimidation or lost their jobs for supporting the former president, and is compiling a list of names of people who have been punished in this fashion. These figures have not been confirmed independently.
The authorities strongly deny these charges.
“We need only transparent elections that are fair and inspire confidence,” said Sarkisian, answering questions in parliament.
In the northern Lori region of Armenia, the governor heads the pro-government Republican Party but is allowing staff working under him to support the opposition.
Arman Musinian, Ter-Petrosian’s press secretary, said that this was a rare exception to the general rule.
“There are some honest leaders within the state system who understand that people have the right to express their will and make a free choice,” said Musinian.
Musinian said the Ter-Petrosian campaign headquarters constantly gets visits from people who work for the government, both in national ministries and local administrations.
“Sometimes these are high-ranking people,” he said. “They ask for CDs or other materials, and even offer their help, but they try to do it surreptitiously because they are afraid of losing their jobs. These people run into not thousands but tens of thousands.”
Ter-Petrosian has used his position as the first president of independent Armenia to target state-sector employees.
In the first press conference he gave in the election campaign, he predicted that the whole “state pyramid” would collapse in the run-up to the vote. His supporters also predicted that he would win public backing from some state officials.
Ter-Petrosian has won some support from other political forces, for example the Heritage Party of former foreign minister Raffi Hovannisian and the New Times party of Aram Karapetyan.
He has also been backed by some senior members of the Yerkrapah Union, Armenia’s largest veterans’ organisation. It too has close ties to the government and the Republican Party. Ter-Petrosian was publicly endorsed by the party’s branch in the northwestern region of Shirak during a rally in the regional centre Gyumri.
His candidacy has in addition been endorsed by Test of Spirit, an influential organisation uniting veterans of the Karabakh war. The group is led by Sasun Mikaelian and Hakob Hakobian, both of them members of the ruling Republican faction in parliament.
“We stand by our commander-in-chief with whom we waged and won the fight for freedom in Artsakh [Karabakh],” Mikaelian told a rally. “We are loyal to him.”
The Republican party said on February 11 that the decision by Mikaelian and Hakobian to back Ter-Petrosian was not a sign of serious cracks emerging in the Sarkisian camp.
“We are not worried about mass defections because our team is very strong, very stable, very powerful and you will see that once again on February 19,” party spokesman Eduard Sharmazanov told the A1plus news website. “The behaviour of one or two party members cannot be attributed to the whole party.”
There were some press reports that 300 members of the pro-government Prosperous Armenia party had teamed up with Ter-Petrosian. However, there has been no public declaration to this effect, and party spokesman Baghdasar Mherian said only one person had left his party in recent times, and that was for reasons that had nothing to do with politics.
Samvel Nikoyan, spokesman for the Republican Party, said predictions that the Ter-Petrosyan camp would draw off support from pro-government forces had been proven empty.
“Time has shown that everything that was said was a propaganda instrument, mere wishful thinking,” said Nikoyan.
Larisa Alaverdian, a former human rights ombudsman who now represents the Heritage Party in parliament, insists voters must be courageous enough to make up their own minds who they want to vote for on election day.
“If we want to build a law-based state, then we need to drive the slave out of ourselves,” she said. “It ought to be a matter of pride for the state system if it contains people with different points of view. Such viewpoints shouldn’t be reduced to ‘I love you’ or ‘I don’t love you’, but should be articulated in a more civilised manner.”
Naira Melkumian is a freelance journalist in Yerevan. Naira Bulghadaryan, correspondent for ArmeniaNow Online and the Civil Initiative Newspaper in Vanadzor, also contributed to this article.
