According to official election results, Civil Contract garnered 49 percent of the vote that will give it 19 seats in the 33-member local council empowered to appoint the head of the recently enlarged community. The opposition Victory bloc came in second with roughly 31 percent, followed by the opposition Mayr Hayastan (Mother Armenia) party, which got 5.5 percent. None of the five other election contenders passed the legal 4 percent threshold for being represented in the council.
The community comprised only Vagharshapat and the nearby village of Voskehat until its pro-government mayor, Diana Gasparian, resigned in May this year shortly before being prosecuted on corruption charges. Following Gasparian’s resignation, the Armenian government decided to merge it with 16 other villages. The move was clearly designed to help Civil Contract retain control of the local government.
The official vote results show that nearly half of the 15,298 ballots cast for Civil Contract came from the 16 villages that were for years run by the ruling party’s top election candidate, Argishti Mekhakian. The combined population of those villages is roughly half the number of people living in Vagharshapat. The party led by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian only narrowly edged the Victory bloc in the historic town also known as Echmiazdin and was defeated by it in Voskehat.
Pashinian did not attend any campaign rallies or other pre-election events organized by Mekhakian, fueling media speculation that he is seen as a liability by his party’s local branch. Throughout the election campaign opposition groups and vote monitors accused Civil Contract of effectively buying votes and abusing its government levers otherwise for electoral purposes.
In particular, the vote-monitoring group Akanates seized upon Mekhakian’s revelation that Pashinian’s government spent in September and October an additional 500 million drams ($1.3 million) on infrastructure upgrades in the community. It said the urgent funding was clearly aimed at illegally influencing the election outcome. Mekhakian and other ruling party figures denied that.
Meanwhile, Pashinian portrayed the outcome as a vote of confidence in his government and its policies. In a social media post, he again expressed confidence that Civil Contract will win Armenia’s next general elections due in June 2026.
Pashinian’s party was defeated in two other local elections held in a neighboring rural district as well as the country’s second largest city of Gyumri in March. The district chief, Volodya Grigorian, was shot dead in September while Gyumri Mayor Vartan Ghukasian was arrested in October on corruption charges rejected by him as politically motivated.