By David Stepanyan, exclusively to VK
The pre-election campaigning for the parliamentary elections scheduled for May, 6, comes to a home straight, or rather a ‘home curve’. All 9 competing parties accuse their rivals of ‘bribing the electorate’ or of applying administrative pressure. All the parties call on the people not to take the bribes and not to ‘sell their bright future’. This rhetoric, however, doesn’t stop them from giving the bribes: at least 6 of the 9 competing parties are known to use bribes, while the remaining three (the Communist party, the ‘United Armenians’ and the democratic party) don’t resort to bribes not due to their crystal honesty, but due to the lack of any hope of getting to the parliament.
Bribes, threats and administrative pressure are widely applied in this campaign. A new element of dirty PR is the spreading of sensitive and negative information about rival candidates through special leaflets. The information spread in this manner is of course partially slanderous. These Pr-writers made all the candidates learn some new and surprising things about themselves and their families. These PR masters (all except those who work for the ruling Republican party) also resort to the trick that is 100% successful – rail at the power. This gives a window of opportunity even to the ‘Prosperous Armenia’ and the ‘Orinats Yenkir’ parties, who were parts of the ruling coalition up until recently.
The president and the government have assured Armenian public and the international community of their desire to conduct ‘fair and transparent’ elections more then once. Some actual steps were undertaken: for example, the election law was reformed. The state TV also abstains from airing anti-opposition reports. All parties, even the smallest ones, have access to the state media. However, the channels belonging to the leaders of some political forces of course give the major part of the air-time to their patrons. However, all these positive steps are unlikely to change the general picture of the elections ‘a la Armenia’.
There’s no sense in suggesting that the elections are being rigged on the level of the e-system of the count. The fraud is possible only in the polling stations themselves, especially in the single-mandate districts where the majoritarian system is in place. There the local ‘businessmen’ have no problems with bribing the whole election commission and then passing the votes to whoever they work for. That is why all parties (apart form the ruling RPA) wanted to pass on to the 100% proportional election system. So it seems that the RPA, even tough it promised the ‘transparent and fair’ elections remains the chief falsifier, and that is why no real anti-fraud measures have been undertaken. Even the transparent ballot boxes are not as efficient as they seem at first: the falsifiers learned to ‘compress’ ballots thus squeezing 50 votes instead of one in one time.
The autoriies made onlyt the secondary things ‘transparent’. In the meantime the administrative pressure applied by the ruling RPA is unprecedented: they are not only promising some advantages to their supporters, they threaten the people who don’t want to vote for them.
For example, the CEO of one of the biggest markets in Armenia made all his salesmen (more than 4,000 people) come to a pro-RPA rally, threatening the fire them if they don’t comply. One of the school directors told the teachers that he’ll personally check how they filled their ballots. And similar cases can be counted by thousands. It seems that the ruling party has no other leverage other than administrative pressure left in its store.
Mass migration, tax pressure on small and medium-sized enterprises, constant growth of poverty – all these factors are unlikely to make the Armenians sympathetic with the ruling party. It is noteworthy that the only prominent figure who is campaigning for this biggest political party in Armenian – is its leader and the country’s President Serge Sarksyan. And to give an adequate response to such a level of administrative pressure the ruling party’s major rivals can do nothing but use bribes.
