A woman wearing a face mask walks past campaign banners of acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in Yerevan, on June 16, 2021. (KAREN MINASYAN / AFP)
MOSCOW – Armenia's acting prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, has kept power in a parliamentary election despite being widely blamed for a military defeat last year in the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.
Nikol Armenia, which hosts a Russian military base, is an ally of Moscow although relations have been cooler under Pashinyan
Pashinyan's Civil Contract party won 53.92 percent of votes cast in Sunday's snap election, according to preliminary results on Monday. Former President Robert Kocharyan's Armenia Alliance trailed on 21.04 percent, and questioned the credibility of the result, the Interfax news agency reported.
The government called the election to try to end a political crisis that began when ethnic Armenian forces ceded territory to Azerbaijan in and around Nagorno-Karabakh in six weeks of fighting last year.
The hostilities caused international concern because the wider South Caucasus region is a corridor for pipelines carrying natural oil and gas to world markets.
Pashinyan, 46, faced street protests after the defeat and demands for his resignation over the terms of a peace agreement under which Azerbaijan regained control of territory it had lost during a war in the early 1990s.
Pashinyan described the agreement as a disaster but said he had been compelled to sign it in order to prevent greater human and territorial losses.
He wrote on Twitter that his party will have a constitutional majority – at least 71 deputies out of 105 – and "will form a government led by me."
Pashinyan said Armenia would strengthen ties with Russia-led regional groups, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).
"We are determined to work on improving, deepening and developing relations (with CSTO and EAEU countries), and we will definitely move in this direction," Russia's RIA news agency quoted Pashinyan as saying in an address broadcast on Facebook.
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Armenia, which hosts a Russian military base, is an ally of Moscow although relations have been cooler under Pashinyan, who came to power on the back of street protests and on an anti-corruption agenda in 2018.
Another regional power, Turkey, supported Azerbaijan in last year's conflict and watches developments in Armenia closely.
Kocharyan's bloc raises questions
Final results will be announced a week after the elections, Interfax cited Central Election Commission (CEC) head Tigran Mukuchyan as saying on Monday. He said the results gave Pashinyan the right to form a government on his own.
Opinion polls had put Pashinyan's party and Korcharyan's Armenia Alliance neck and neck.
"These results contradict the processes of public life which we have observed in the past eight months," the alliance said in a statement, carried by Interfax.
Kocharyan is a native of Nagorno-Karabakh. The enclave is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but much of the population is ethnic Armenian.
was Armenia's president from 1998 to 2008 and was accused of acting unlawfully when he introduced a state of emergency in March 2008 after a disputed election. At least 10 people were killed in clashes that followed between police and protesters.
There were 319 reports of voting irregularities, RIA reported. The CEC said the elections were largely in line with legal norms and observers from a CIS monitoring mission said the vote was open and fair, Interfax cited them as saying on Monday.