Armenian Presidential Pre-Election Campaign Kicks Off

Today marked the official start of the pre-election period for the 19 February 2008 presidential election in Armenia. As with most elections, the campaign of course started long ago. Ironically, however, rather than the party of power campaigning throughout the country to the concern of civil society activists who screamed foul, it was instead the former president, Levon Ter-Petrossian, who was everywhere.

In a sense, the start of the 2008 presidential election in Armenia was actually somewhat subdued as a result. Large billboards of the prime minister, Serge Sargsyan, sprung up here and there, but nowhere in as large a number as those for the pro-governmental Republican and Prosperous Armenia parties during last May’s parliamentary election. The prime minister’s face could also be seen adorning the front of a few election offices scattered throughout the city.

They may have been less visible than in past elections in Armenia, but for now at least, there was no sign of any other political activity. One of the reasons for this might have been the cold. At least three candidates for the 2008 presidential election , including the Armenian Revolutionary Federation — Dashnaktsutyun who last year launched their campaign with an open-air public event, instead chose the warm interior of the Marriott Armenia to hold press conferences.

First up, however, was Orinats Yerkir’s Artur Baghdasarian, a former Speaker of the National Assembly who fell out of grace with the authorities his party was itself part of starting from April 2004. In last year’s parliamentary election, Baghdasarian’s Orinats Yerkir was just one of two opposition parties that made it past the 5 percent threshold for representation in the Armenian National Assembly, attracting 7.1 percent of the vote.

In a roundup of the start of the pre-election campaign, albeit biased in favor of Ter-Petrossian, RFE/RL briefly covered Baghdasarian’s press conference as well as that of the ARF-D’s Vahan Hovannisian.

Another major opposition contender, former parliament speaker Artur Baghdasarian, kicked off his campaign, titled “A civic movement for new Armenia,” with an official presentation of his 32-page election manifesto in Yerevan. “My victory will eliminate corruption and embezzlement rooted in the country,” he told to journalists and activists of his Orinats Yerkir party. “My victory will mean equality before law, a drastic rise in the living standards of the people of Armenia.”

Baghdasarian dismissed claims by government loyalists that the Armenian opposition can not scuttle a handover of power from outgoing President Robert Kocharian to Sarkisian because it has failed to field a single presidential candidate. “There are and there will be alliances,” he said without elaborating. “As for the authorities, they are not united either,” he added, noting that Sarkisian is also challenged by a candidate of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun), a junior partner in the governing coalition.

The Dashnaktsutyun candidate, Vahan Hovannisian, held a similar campaign event in Yerevan later in the day. Both he and Baghdasarian have said that the presidential election will require two rounds of voting.

Despite the somewhat lopsided weighting towards Ter-Petrosian’s visit to several villages and towns in the Aragatsotn and Shirak regions of Armenia, RFE/RL did at least again briefly mention the two other main candidates who also held press conferences today — National Unity’s Artashes Geghamian and the National Democratic Union’s Vazgen Manukyan. Both were critical of Ter-Petrossian directly or indirectly.

Former President Levon Ter-Petrosian was the first to hit the road, with other major opposition candidates contenting themselves with holding news conferences and other indoors meetings. For his part, Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian, the presumed frontrunner, visited several of his campaign offices in Yerevan.

[…]

Ter-Petrosian, meanwhile, spent the day touring towns and villages in central Armenia in a motorcade of about 40 cars that carried leaders of various opposition groups supporting his presidential bid. His meetings there appeared to attract considerable interest from local residents who turned out to hear their former president speak publicly for the first time in over a decade. Hundreds attended a Ter-Petrosian rally in the town of Artik, the starting point of the campaign swing.

[…]

“I have not come here to ask or beg for votes. That’s Serzh’s business because he has no votes in Armenia,” Ter-Petrosian claimed on Monday, prompting “Levon! Levon!” chants from the crowd.

Ter-Petrosian again sounded supremely confident of his victory as he spoke at a similar rally held in another small town, Aparan. “It’s you, not me, who will win on February 19,” he claimed in a town square opposite Sarkisian’s local campaign headquarters. “I congratulate you on your victory in advance.”

[…]

Also meeting journalists was another opposition candidate, Artashes Geghamian. Geghamian again spent much of his news conference, supposedly devoted to his campaign platform, attacking Ter-Petrosian and denouncing what he called a “barbaric” smear campaign waged against him by opposition newspapers. The latter have alleged that Geghamian was bribed by the authorities to enter the fray with the sole aim of discrediting the ex-president.

[…]

Geghamian is not the only opposition candidate highly critical of Ter-Petrosian. Vazgen Manukian, Ter-Petrosian’s erstwhile comrade-in-arms and a longtime political rival, clearly had the ex-president in mind on Monday when he urged disgruntled voters not to look for a “lesser evil.” While having no fond memories of Ter-Petrosian’s years in power, many of them are even more unhappy with the current Armenian leadership and feel that only he can unseat it.

“An election must represent a choice between the good and the bad,” Manukian said in a meeting with a group of young Armenians. “The people must choose the good, and not the lesser evil.”

This reality is not lost on many voters although it is totally irresponsible for RFE/RL to imply that Manukian was referring to Ter-Petrossian when looking for a “lesser evil.” In previous interviews, Manukian has been quite clear that for many more voters, Ter-Petrosian is loathed more than Sargsyan. As Internews Armenia’s E-Channel reported on Friday [edited for clarity with the original Armenian below], for example:

“When the opposition puts forward a candidate, and society sees that he is not the least of the evils, but the authorities [are] – now is the case when something more dangerous happens.”

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Somewhat ironically, RFE/RL was a little better in its coverage until recently when its tone started to become more and more pro-Ter-Petrossian just as it became one of the few supporters of the radical opposition in last year’s parliamentary election who otherwise lacked any real support in society and polled just 2.9 percent of the vote. Nevertheless, Manukian’s record of interviews so far shows that RFE/RL’s assumption in yesterday’s reporting is misleading and actually incorrect to say the least.

This is particularly concerning given that RFE/RL has properly quoted him in the past.

“They are putting the people in a very difficult situation because the majority of the people do not accept either party,” Manukian told a news conference. “There are people who consider Levon Ter-Petrosian the lesser evil but there are also many, many people who consider Serzh Sarkisian the lesser evil. And I don’t exclude that if Levon Ter-Petrosian and Serzh Sarkisian go into the second round Serzh Sarkisian will emerge as a legitimate president.”

Incidentally, opinion polls show Sargsyan leading the pack in the presidential race. Indeed, independent journalists and analysts in Armenia currently believe the prime minister has around 30 percent support nationwide. Levon Ter-Petrossian, they say, has not more than 10-15 percent. IRI/Gallup polls, however, put candidates such as Baghdasarian ahead of the former president, although his campaign team as well as sympathetic journalists allege that the surveys are false.

If they are, then other political heavyweights such as former U.S.-born Raffi Hovannisian are not eager to jump on board just yet. In another article, RFE/RL reports that Hovannisian’s Heritage party are remaining neutral. The radio station, however, says that less than half of the party’s seven MPs back the former president.

Other albeit it pro-ARF-D and anti-Ter-Petrossian sources allege that Hovannisian is waiting for assurances that the ARF-D’s Hovannisian (no relation) does not pull out of the race before the 9 February deadline for doing so.

Opposition leader Raffi Hovannisian indicated over the weekend that he and his Zharangutyun (Heritage) party will not endorse any of Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian’s four main election challengers before the first round of voting slated for February 19.

In a statement issued on Saturday, the party’s governing board said it will decide whom to support “later on” if at least one of them fails to drop out of the presidential race in favor of another opposition candidate. It said none of the four candidates, among them former President Levon Ter-Petrosian, stands a chance of defeating Sarkisian on his own.

“If participation in the presidential race is an end in itself, rather than a chance to win for those political forces, maybe we should wait for the [run-up to the] second round and see who the public supports the most,” the Zharangutyun spokesman, Hovsep Khurshudian, told RFE/RL. “We will naturally support that force.”

“There has to be a consolidation of forces. The mistakes made during the parliamentary elections must not be repeated,” Khurshudian said, referring to the Armenian opposition’s failure to set up major alliances in the run-up to the May 2007 vote. The Zharangutyun statement went further, saying that “appropriate lessons have not been learned” by the opposition.

With the results of various opinion polls questioned by the opposition, but with every candidate claiming to be leading their rivals without any evidence to back such a possibility up, it is still not clear how the pre-election campaign will unfold. While it is true that the prime minister does appear to have more support than any other candidate, the vast majority of voters prefer other candidates or are undecided.

Indeed, quite unlike at any other time before, the battle is on with everything to play for not in terms of beating the election favorite, prime minister Sargsyan, but rather in terms of who will prove to be his main challenger. The radical opposition claim that it will be Ter-Petrossian, but the former leader is still considered synonymous with the cold, dark early years of independence when criminality and corruption skyrocketed. One opposition party was banned and media outlets were closed down.

Interestingly, while RFE/RL’s bias is strongly weighted in support of Ter-Petrossian, ArmInfo raised the possibility of Heritage support for the ARF-D’s Hovannisian in its coverage. Although Heritage has met with Ter-Petrossian, its supporters are very much divided on the issue of backing the former president. Some that say they would even vote for Sargsyan if it meant preventing a Ter-Petrossian victory. Of course, others take the opposite line as well.

Asked whether the possibility of support of ARF Dashnaksutyun representative Vahan Hovhannisyan increases in the context of Leader of the National-Democratic Union Vazgen Manukyan’s probable withdrawal from the fight in Vahan Hovhannisyan’s favor and Heritage Party’s appeal to four candidates to join forces, Khurshudyan replied: “Among our questions addressed to presidential candidates, there was a question on the intention to go up to the end during the electoral campaign. Now I can only say that possible consolidation of at least two alternative candidates to the power is unlikely to play a crucial role when we take a decision”. Khurshudyan didn’t rule out the possibility that Heritage may take the final decision before the possible second round of the presidential election.

And because for now at least the presidential election is still considered a battle between the “lesser of two evils” by many, while the pre-election period will be crucial for both Sargsyan and Ter-Petrossian, it might be more relevant to examine how the other main contenders fare and whether the others back out to support a single candidate other than Sargsyan or Ter-Petrosian.

Here, Raffi Hovannisian’s words about the candidates being unable to defeat Sargsyan unless they united perhaps ring true. More importantly, Hovannisian finally coming out in support of one of the candidates challenging Sargsyan might be pivotal in determining the outcome of the election. Most Armenians probably won’t agree, however. At the beginning of the pre-election campaign they see little or no alternative to the prime minister on offer.

If that remains the case, unless one of the opposition candidates can earn the trust of the population, apathy, vote bribes and dislike of the alternatives could well contribute to what many see as unavoidable anyway. That is, a victory for Sargsyan. Ironically, critics of Ter-Petrossian argue that it is the return of the former president that makes such an eventuality more likely. Time will tell, but at the very least it will mean a pre-election campaign quite like any other in recent memory.

Photos: Artur Baghdasarian — Orinats Yerkir Press Conference, Marriott Armenia, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2008