The Municipal Election was a Referendum on the PM, but is that Good for Yerevan?

Last week, Yerevantsis took to the polls for the first time since the spring’s Velvet Revolution. Hayk Marutyan, running on the ‘My Step’ ticket (a coalition dominated by PM Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party), won with an astounding 81% of the counted ballots: the largest margin in Yerevan’s democratic history. By the time the votes were tallied, all the major candidates had hailed the election as democratic and conceded the results.

By any measure, last week’s election was a significant step forward for democratic consolidation in Armenia. In contrast with previous elections, common electoral violations, including vote buying, the use of administrative resources, and voter intimidation, were nowhere to be found. The Central Election Committee (CEC) recorded only 129 complaints (compared to 1,618 for the previous year). The uninitiated observer could be forgiven for assuming that this was just a run of the mill election, given the civil tone of the campaign and uneventful election day.