Armenian Prime minister Nikol Pashinyan © Gevorg Ghazaryan/Shutterstock
To little fanfare, campaigning last week kicked off for municipal elections to be held in Yerevan next month. Despite the inauspicious start, however, the vote could prove eventful with local matters such as public transportation and garbage collection playing second fiddle to much larger issues facing the country – Karabakh and the future of the Armenian prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, in particular.
With parliamentary elections not scheduled in the country until 2026, some opposed to the premiere view the election of a new city council as a way to build upon growing dissatisfaction with Pashinyan’s leadership. This includes preventing the signing of an Armenia-Azerbaijan peace agreement at a time when negotiations are at a critical make or break point.
With Yerevan home to at least 35 percent of Armenia’s population, the question of who controls Yerevan has always weighed heavily on the minds of all governments in Armenia. Until 2009, the city had been governed by a hand-picked mayor without any election at all. Constitutional changes passed in 2005, as part of obligations to the Council of Europe in 2005, however, changed all that.
But even those changes were controversial. Rather than directly elect a mayor, residents of Yerevan will instead vote for a 65-seat city council which would then select a mayor in a move intended to prevent those elections turning into a battle for political and economic power. That was, at least, until the devastating 2020 war with Azerbaijan over the former Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO).
In December 2021, the city council dismissed Hayk Marutyan, Pashinyan’s mayor elected in a post-revolution euphoria, when the two fell out in the aftermath of Armenia’s defeat by Azerbaijan. Moreover, concerned that Marutyan might make a political comeback, a criminal investigation into allegations of corruption was launched against him last year .
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