PACE Plenary Session: Pashinyan highlights ‘unprecedented’ free elections during his administration

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, in his speech at the PACE Plenary Session in Strasbourg, highlighted free elections in Armenia during his administration and said that no attempts of vote-rigging have taken place in the country since the 2018 revolution.

“During this period, two parliamentary elections were held, and local self-government elections in all communities across Armenia, and in some places even twice. The general elections of 2018 and 2021 were assessed by the international community as free, competitive, and meeting democratic standards, which was unprecedented in our history. There have been no protest actions related to the results of any local self-government elections, and opposition parties have won in several communities, which was essentially impossible before the 2018 revolution,” the Prime Minister said.

Pashinyan emphasized that the concept of “post-election processes” has disappeared from Armenia’s political life, referring to a time when people “linked their hopes for change to these processes because they knew the elections would be rigged by the authorities.”

The Prime Minister also noted that electoral democracy in Armenia still faces challenges.

“The practice of vote-buying by certain forces in Armenia continues. The problem is not only that law enforcement requires great effort to uncover such cases, but also that there are no practical mechanisms to determine the extent of vote-buying’s impact on election results. As a consequence, practical mechanisms to exclude those who distribute vote-buying from the political and electoral processes either do not exist or are unclear, and the activation of such mechanisms can be perceived as an attempt to control the elections,” Pashinyan warned. In this case, he added, the presence of those who obtained their mandate through vote-buying in parliament or local self-government bodies is perceived as a failure to protect democracy.