Armenia’s presidential election: Democracy, it’s wonderful

Date: 22/02/03

Especially for the incumbent - but maybe not quite wonderful enough

IT was one of the dirtiest elections even Armenians can remember: more petty fraud, many said, than in the infamous presidential ballot of 1996, in which allegations of ballot-rigging sparked such threatening demonstrations that the then president, Levon Ter-Petrossian, sent tanks onto the streets. Officially the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which had sent 200 observers, said the election process culminating in the vote on February 19th “fell short of international standards in several key respects”. Privately, one experienced OSCE team member called it “a disaster.”

A fairly typical example was the polling station where The Economist watched the count. Observers from the opposition parties said that, late in the day, two young men had come in and stuffed a few handfuls of ballot papers into the box before running out again. The papers, they said, had been folded twice in the same direction, instead of lengthwise and then crosswise, as most voters folded them. And sure enough, as the vote-counters plucked the papers from the box one by one, there was a period when an unusually large number were folded lengthwise - and, lo, most of those were for the (since 1998) incumbent president, Robert Kocharian.

He also had the media behind him. One Armenian monitoring organisation counted five times as much television coverage for Mr Kocharian as for all his opponents put together. Early results gave Mr Kocharian 51%, just enough to save him from a run-off with his leading opponent, Stepan Demirchian. Surprise, surprise, murmured cynics. It was just such a “result” that set off the protests in 1996. Yet at the last moment somebody's nerves must have cracked, under a bit of OSCE arm-twisting, maybe. By the afternoon, the election commission was announcing that Mr Kocharian had fallen just short of an absolute majority: he had 49.8%, and must face a run-off after all.

Mr Demirchian's father, Karen, a charismatic former Communist boss, was one of eight leading politicians assassinated in parliament in 1999. The case is murky, and the trial of the killers still drags on. The younger Mr Demirchian has inherited his father's good looks and gravelly voice, which helped him to inherit some sympathy votes too. His closing rally in Yerevan, three days before polling day, was the biggest gathering locals could recall since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even so, he scored - officially - only 27.7%.

Has he a real chance now? This Mr Demirchian did not, by common consent, inherit much of his father's intellect. Even if he can win in the second round, he would have to build a good team and be a wily operator to make headway against Armenia's entrenched political forces; to say nothing of its hostile neighbours, Azerbaijan and - though the Turks would not put it quite this way - Turkey.