Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s Civil Contract party won most votes (36.8 percent) but fell well short of an absolute majority in the city council empowered to appoint the mayor. Official vote results show that it will hold only 14 seats in the 33-member council. The 19 other seats will be controlled by four opposition groups, putting them in a position to install the mayor.
Vartan Ghukasian, a former Gyumri mayor who ran in Sunday’s election on the Armenian Communist Party (HKK) ticket, staked a claim to that post after the HKK came in second with almost 20.7 percent of the vote. He quickly won the backing of two other opposition contenders that polled 7.9 percent and 6.2 percent respectively.
The fourth opposition force, the Our City bloc of Gyumri-based opposition lawmaker Martun Grigorian, has still not clarified whether it will provide the decisive support for Ghukasian. The two men and their influential families have long been at loggerheads with each other. They have not overcome their feud despite their shared opposition to Pashinian.
Grigorian, whose bloc won almost 16 percent of the vote, has faced since Sunday night growing pressure from Armenian opposition circles to throw his weight behind Ghukasian for the sake of ousting Pashinian’s party from the municipal administration. In a short and cryptic Facebook post, Grigorian promised on Monday that “Civil Contract will not have a mayor in Gyumri.”
Some media outlets reported that he will reluctantly give Ghukasian the necessary votes in the city council. However, Grigorian made no statements to that effect as of Tuesday evening. He continued to avoid answering phone calls from reporters, and his election campaign headquarters remained closed.
Speaking to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service, Ghukasian said that he is still unaware of Grigorian’s post-election plans.
“We are waiting for his reply,” the controversial ex-mayor told 24news.am later in the day.
Meanwhile, Nazeli Baghdasarian, Pashinian’s Gyumri-born spokeswoman who actively participated in the ruling party’s election campaign, predicted disapprovingly that Grigorian will agree to help Ghukasian take up the post of mayor. She also claimed that the opposition contenders got their votes as a result of “misleading the people and abusing their trust.”
The politically diverse opposition has charged, for its part, that Civil Contract and its mayoral candidate, Sarik Minasian, heavily abused their government levers before and during the election.
A senior Civil Contract figure, Arsen Torosian, said that Pashinian’s party will propose Minasian’s mayoral candidacy at the inaugural session of the local council later this month. Failure to install him as mayor would not be an “apocalypse” for the party, he said. Torosian also insisted that the outcome of the Gyumri election does not testify to a lack of popular support for Pashinian’s government.