Kocharyan criticizes campaign rhetoric, election process

PanARMENIAN.Net - Robert Kocharyan, Armenia’s second president and leader of the Hayastan Alliance, said Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan based “90 percent” of his parliamentary election campaign on hate speech. Kocharyan made the remarks in an interview with several media outlets, according to Pastinfo.

“For example, he says he will imprison national philanthropist Samvel Karapetyan and turn him into a homeless man. For what reason? He has never held public office; he earned his money abroad. Or Gagik Tsarukyan, who earned his wealth through his own work and is one of Armenia’s largest philanthropists.

Speaking about peace, he said: ‘If I am not here, there will be war in September.’ Those are his words. The rest of the campaign was about ‘putting people in prison.’ Are we electing a prime minister or a prosecutor?” Kocharyan said.

He added that there are specialized medical institutions where one person believes he is Napoleon and another believes he is some other famous figure.

“What can I say if someone believes it is acceptable during an election campaign to say about the opposition that he will imprison them, throw them against walls and so on? This speaks not only about upbringing but also about agony,” he said, adding that references had also been made several times to killing him personally.

Kocharyan stated that if a process similar to the 2026 parliamentary elections had taken place in the past, European countries would at least have assessed it as problematic. According to him, applying double standards, they have now “turned a blind eye to unprecedented electoral violations,” Sputnik Armenia reported.

In his view, Europe today evaluates actions depending on who carries them out and whether the person involved is considered “one of their own.”

“This is the real picture today, and it is also a major responsibility for European Union countries and the European bureaucracy because they are effectively nurturing another dictator, something they have already experienced in various other countries,” Kocharyan said.

According to the former president, the most extraordinary development during the election was the decision of the Central Electoral Commission of Armenia that resulted in the Prosperous Armenia Party not entering parliament.

“As if that were not enough, the next day the chairman of the CEC gave an interview trying to justify why he did it. His reasoning was essentially that a recount is, roughly speaking, not a good thing. Your job is to enforce the law, not to interpret it and violate it through such a peculiar interpretation. The CEC chairman and all commission members committed that crime, but when the time comes they will testify about the pressure exerted on them. That is a confession of a crime, and the prosecutor’s office should deal with it if it is truly a prosecutor’s office,” Kocharyan said.

He stressed that there was no instrument available to the executive branch that it could have used and did not use.

The former president also said he had not imagined there would be such repression, such a degree of influence on the public-sector system, or so many arrests and criminal cases. He expressed confidence that not even half of these alleged violations had occurred during other elections.

On June 14, the final results of the June 7 parliamentary election were published. The Civil Contract party received 726,819 votes, or 49.7456 percent; Strong Armenia received 340,006 votes, or 23.2710 percent; and the Hayastan Alliance received 144,983 votes, or 9.9231 percent. The Prosperous Armenia Party failed to pass the 4 percent threshold, receiving 58,287 votes, or 3.9893 percent.

Civil Contract will hold 64 seats in parliament, including three allocated to representatives of national minorities. Strong Armenia will have 29 seats, including one Assyrian representative, while the Hayastan Alliance will hold 12 seats.