EVEN IF THE ELECTIONS WERE IDEAL IT WOULD HAVE HARDLY BEEN POSSIBLE TO AVOID NEGATIVE JUDGMENT OF OBSERVERS

PanARMENIAN.Net - The majority of the votes given in the first round to former candidates went to the incumbent President. The number of Robert Kocharian’s supporters increased by 300 thousand while Stepan Demirchyan managed to get additional 100 thousand votes. Under participation of 67% of the voters, 70 thousand votes were enough for Robert Kocharian to win. It is evident that as we have forecasted, the absolute majority of those who gave their votes to Artashes Geghamyan in the first round, prefereed Kocharian in the second. In the second round the number of voters increased by 120 thousand as compared with the first round.. It can be assumed that the majority of those “new” voters also gave their votes to the incumbent President. It is natural that the opposition did not accept its defeat. It is also natural that the electoral headquarters of Stepan Demirchyan speaks about mass falsifications. It is interesting that already in the morning of March 5, immediately after the beginning of voting, Stepan Demirchyan told the journalists that “the opposition will not accept the results of the elections, if Robert Kocharian is elected President”. Do not thinking about the consequences of the things said, the candidate warned that if he lost he was going to declare that the voting was falsified. The leader of the People’s party, in fact, said that the transparency and the democracy of the elections meant nothing for him. The only criterion is – who wins. If it is not Demirchyan, it means the elections are illegal. Rather strange logic, isn’t it?

There is another interesting fact. The night when the calculation of votes was going on, and the members of the team of Stepan Demiucrhyan did not know yet about the difference in the votes got by the candidates, the head of Demirchyan’s electoral headquarters Grigor Harutyunyan said that the number of participants in the voting was 400 thousand less then announced. He was sure that all the additional ballot papers were for Kocharian. But even if this were true, the votes got by the President would have been enough for winning. The impartiality of judgments of the Western observers is also doubtful. We shall remind that unlike the CIS observers, who said the elections were rather democratic and just, the OSCE and Council of Europe representatives said the elections were not corresponding to the European standards. But if we view this statement in the context of international and regional political processes, it will become evident that the assessments of the OSCE and PACE observers have been stipulated by global interests of the West, which prefers the authorities of Armenia to be unstable, thus being a subject to outside influences.

The United States have already taken advantage of the conclusion of the observers aiming at creating a basis for making pressure over Armenia. The pres secretary of the Department of State Richard Boucher made a strange statement Thursday, in fact, provoking the Armenian opposition. He made it understand that Washington comprehended “the protests of the opposition”. Indirectly accusing the authorities of the lack of legitimacy, the United States, according to us, count on more availability of the Armenian authorities to make concessions in the Karabakh issue. It can be assumed that the pressure on Yerevan may last till the Presidential elections of Azerbaijan scheduled for September. The illegitimacy of the Presidential elections of Azerbaijan is already clear because Heydar Aliyev violates the Constitution wishing to be elected for the third term. It is not ruled out that such harsh conclusions about the elections in Armenia can be explained by the wish to create a balance while evaluating the regimes governing in Yerevan and Baku.

If so, it is evident that it wouldn’t be possible to avoid the negative reaction of the Western observers in any case. Even if the Armenian authorities have managed to conduct ideal elections...