Pashinyan describes weekend elections as ‘new standard of democracy’
YEREVAN, June 24. /ARKA/. Armenia’s acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan described last Sunday early parliamentary elections as a ‘new standard of democracy’ and announced the end of the political crisis in the country when he spoke at a recurrent Cabinet session today.
“We have successfully completed the parliamentary elections. I am glad to record that international and local observers are unanimous in their conclusion that the elections were held in accordance with democratic criteria, and actually we have set new standards,” Pashinyan said.
According to European observers, the weekend parliamentary elections won by Prime Minister and his Civil Contract party were competitive and generally very well-managed within a short time frame and without any compromise to their democratic character.
“The possible results of the June 20 election were not predictable, unlike the previous 2018 December snap polls. In fact the latest elections were the most unpredictable in the history of the third republic, but the main thing is that we recorded our political will and the system of political values. As we promised to our society, the indisputability of the election results and the freedom of expression of the voters' will is a cornerstone value to us,” Pashinyan said.
“It is the citizens who really decide the fate of the authorities. This is a powerful political fact and I am glad that we have gone through this difficult crisis and are completing it this way,”Pashinyan said.
According to the official results announced by the Central Election Commission (CEC) on Monday morning, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party won almost 54 percent of the vote and will retain a two-thirds majority in the Armenian parliament.
Ex-president Robert Kocharyan’s Armenia bloc came in a distant second with 21 percent, followed by the opposition Pativ Unem alliance led by another ex-president, Serzh Sargsyan which got 5.2 percent.
Although Pativ Unem failed to clear the 7 percent threshold it will have parliament seats because Armenian law stipulates that at least three political forces must be represented in the National Assembly.
Kocharyan’s bloc said on Monday that it will ask Armenia’s Constitutional Court to overturn the official results of Sunday’s parliamentary elections. It claimed that the results are “extremely dubious.
”We have serious grounds to consider these elections illegitimate,” it said in a statement. -0-
