Armenia: The Fifty Three Per Cent Solution

Writing for the National Interest, the Institute for War & Peace Reporting’s Thomas de Waal offers his opinion on elections held this year in Armenia and Georgia. In particular, and echoing the concern of many foreign analysts and journalists, de Waal is critical of the role the international community has played in turning a blind eye to electoral indiscretions.

Post-Soviet elections have become elaborately choreographed occasions. The script is now getting so precise that we even know what the preferred winning share of the vote is for an official candidate in the South Caucasus: 53 percent. Twice already this year, 53 percent has been the decisive number in presidential elections in the post-Soviet countries of Georgia and Armenia.

This all stems from the authorities working to organize a desired result by using what the Russians call “the administrative resource”: pressure on the media and protégés across the country to deliver the right result on election day. In perfect harmony, the opposition plans just as much for the protests the day after elections as they do for the vote itself. In the latest Azerbaijani elections, opposition activists headed straight for pre-prepared rallies from the polling stations.

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These elections were in fact not massively rigged. It is possible that both Saakashvili and Sarkisian might have been elected in an entirely free and fair vote. The trouble is that we will never know if that would have happened. What did take place was fairly widespread vote-rigging and heavily skewed media coverage sharply in favor of the official candidate. This in turn naturally provoked anger from the Georgian and Armenian oppositions, who complained that their elections have been stolen.

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What makes it even worse is the role the third member of this electoral dance—the international community in the shape of election observing teams—played in letting these crises occur. Through a combination of cynicism and incompetence, Western governments put an imprimatur of approval on both these elections that stoked the internal conflicts.

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The point here is not to say that the Georgian and Armenian oppositions are pure democrats who deserve unqualified support. An ironic footnote is that the copyright to the “53 percent solution” belongs to none other than Armenian challenger and former- president Levon Ter-Petrosian, who by common consent stole an election in 1996, when he claimed victory in the first round with no less than 51.8 percent of the vote.

The immediate issue is that these Western-led election observation missions are now as much a part of the problem as the solution. […]