Understanding Armenia’s pre-electoral party landscape: EuFoA publishes Shortpaper

Today, European Friends of Armenia publishes a guide on the Armenian political parties, providing on roughly 1.5 pages per party the key facts about their alliances, poll and election data, history, leadership, political ideologies, foreign relations and European aspirations.

“This guide will serve as a useful tool to anyone interested in better understanding of the party system on the eve of the elections of 6 May”, comments EuFoA’s Secretary General Dr Michael Kambeck. “The whole world, especially Europe, will now watch Armenia and we want all those observers to have an easy access to this seemingly complex party system and to understand more about the context and background of these elections.”

Due to the dynamic nature of Armenia’s young parliamentary system, it is sometimes difficult to keep track of the changing parliamentary alliances. Thus, the guide focuses on the six political forces which hold realistic chances of being elected to the National Assembly this May (according to our TNS-supervised opinion poll of 22 March 2012). It serves to enlighten outside observers on the respective ideologies, socio-economic motivations, and European aspirations, as well as the complex political relationship between the parties. Armenia has had three Presidents since its independence in 1991 and interestingly, all three somehow compete with their forces in these elections: Serzh Sargsyan as current President chairs the ruling Republican Party, Robert Kocharyan is clearly but not outspokenly behind Prosperous Armenia and Levon Ter-Petrosyan leads the ANC. While the first two parties are dominating the campaign and strongly lead in the polls, there are four others which are too close to the 5% threshold to predict their entry, among them three opposition forces, who for historic and ideological reasons cannot join forces. These and other phenomena become clear with this Shortpaper.

Please click here to read the Press Release in PDF format.