Good morning,
We are pleased to start again our live blog with the preliminary results provided by the Armenian Central Electoral Commission. The results show Civil Contract, led by Nikol Pashinyan, to have won with 53.92% of the vote, with the second president Robert Kocharyan's Armenia Alliance taking 21.04% and the party led by Artur Vanetsyan and supported by the third president, Serzh Sargsyan, taking 5.23%. No other parties qualified for parliament.
Please see here the full preliminary results:
The Armenian Central Elections Commission (CEC) has provisionally announced that 1,281,174 votes were cast in today’s elections, constituting 49.4% of those eligible. This is slightly more than the 1,260,840 (48.62%) of votes in the 2018 parliamentary election.
A more thorough breakdown is available here on the CEC website.
The counting process is now taking place. This picture is from constituency 2, polling station 10 in Yerevan.
Reflecting on today’s vote, commonspace.eu's political editor wrote:
The voting has closed. The Armenian people have voted, and the election process appeared to be reasonably well organised and transparent. Now the counting process starts, and often it is here that problems are encountered. These elections, however, may not be conclusive. If no party wins an outright majority of more than fifty per cent, then a process of coalition building will have to start. If within six days of the publication of the official results a coalition is not formed, the election will have to be re-run in four weeks’ time with only the two largest parties on the ballot paper. Many Armenians hope to be spared this uncertainty. The next few hours will tell us what will happen. In the meantime, Armenia’s neighbours are also watching the process. What happens in this election may define the future of peace in the region.
At 20.00 (Yeveran), the polls officially close in the 20 June 2021, Armenian early parliamentary elections.
Polling in Armenia's early parliamentary elections closes in less than an hour's time. Despite some isolated incidents, the day has passed largely peacefully. Many hope things stay that way.
Writing from Tbilisi, Arnold Stepanian, Chairman of the Public Movement Multinational Georgia said that the Armenians of Georgia share the common view that whatever the choice of the Armenian citizens is, the results must be accepted by all political forces. Civil resistance caused by political polarization must not escalate into street resistance! Despite the diametrically opposed positions of the current government and the opposition, the wisdom of the leaders of the main political actors should play a role in ensuring that the process remains peaceful.
The election is being watched by Armenia's neighbours and nowhere more so than Azerbaijan. From Baku, Dr Vasif Huseynov – a Senior Advisor at the Center of Analysis of International Relations (AIR Center) – has given commonspace.eu some insight on what Azerbaijanis are thinking as they follow the Armenian elections:
"Some updates on election day have been read in the Azerbaijani segment of social media as Robert Kocharyan's potential win in the snap parliamentary elections. He is widely seen in Azerbaijan as a revanchist political figure and is considered a threat to regional peace and stability. These concerns have been reinforced by Kocharyan's pre-election narrative and his election campaign, which on its last day on 18 June, staged an anti-Turkic song glorifying the assassination of a Turkish politician by an Armenian."
We now have the third update on voter turn-out in today's Armenian parliamentary elections. At 17.00 (Yerevan), the number of votes cast was 989,972, amounting to 38.17% of those eligible. These figures were released by the Armenian Central Elections Commission.
This announcement means that for the first time today, voter turnout is behind what it was in the last elections of 2018, where 1,025,002 voters – or 39.54% of the total number of voters – had voted at around the same time.
Track the numbers here.
