Event March 22 marked the deadline for political parties to register to compete in Yerevan’s first direct popular elections for Yerevan City Council. The election will take place on May 31. The leader of the victorious party will become the mayor of Yerevan. Six political parties registered: The Republican Party, the Prosperous Armenia party, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation – Dashnaktsutyun, the Rule of Law party, the People’s Party, and the Socialist Labor Party, as did the Armenian National Congress, the assembly of several political parties, led by former president, Levon Ter-Petrossian. The only opposition party represented in Parliament, led by Raffi Hovannisian, chose not to participate, following long and quasi-public negotiations with the Ter-Petrossian team.

Background Prior to the constitutional amendments approved on November 25, 2005, the leadership of the city of Yerevan was appointed, just like those of country’s 10 marzes. In 2005, Yerevan’s electoral status was made more similar to that of other cities. Thus, by 2008, a new set of legal provisions were created and passed, with the help and participation of a variety of European bodies, including the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, in order to assure maximum citizen participation and representative government. According to the new law, the mayor of the city of Yerevan will now be chosen through an indirect election. The people of Yerevan will vote for and elect a city council. Subsequently, the City Council will elect the mayor who will probably be the leader of the victorious political party.

Analysis Nearly half of Armenia’s population resides in Yerevan. Half of the rest depend on Yerevan for their livelihood. The government apparatus for the whole country resides in Yerevan. Yerevan is the center of the Republic of Armenia in the most literal sense, because it is the source of the majority of  the country’s socio-economic resources. Thus the impact of the principles and laws which govern the capital will reverberate far beyond the city. The constitutional amendments were in response to these concerns. Yerevan needed to be structured as a self-governing community for its own sake, and this would also play an important decentralizing role for the country. This would create an active mechanism  to ensure a legitimate balance of power among the systems of government and would necessarily increase competition among the various levels of government to improve the overall quality of governance. The decision that the Yerevan leadership would be selected entirely based on party slates meant that the election inevitably took on local political significance as well. That significance has intensified given the current domestic situation, the still unresolved issues in government-opposition relations, the trust that is still absent as a result of the presidential elections, and the paralysis that struck democratic institutions and from which they have not yet recuperated. With the country’s economy largely based in Yerevan, the economic crisis too came to further exacerbate the situation. The further politicization of these elections was unavoidable with the opposition list being headed by former President and opposition leader Levon Ter-Petrossian, and the opposition announcing that they see these mayoral elections as a continuation of the presidential election. So much so, in fact, that they did not find the political will to back one candidate. So, again, there may be claims of victory, without the initial hard work necessary to ensure such victory. In response, the authorities began a campaign to create an environment within which the public would view these elections within the context of trash pickup, or landscaping, as if the discussion is not about the city of Yerevan which controls the great majority of the country’s resources, but about the election of the head of a condominium association. So, two months prior to the mayoral election, it appears that on May 31, what will be under debate will be the opposition’s attempts to present these elections as the continuation of the presidential, and the authorities’ insistence on viewing these on the level of routine daily life management issues.

Outlook These differing approaches divert the purpose of the election from the issues at hand and instead take it toward two extreme directions. There is no doubt that the Yerevan mayoral election cannot be a continuation of the presidential election. For many reasons, chief among them that if this becomes a general debate on regime change, then the very real challenges and problems facing Yerevan will be excluded from the campaign, and thus the rationale for turning the mayor’s seat into an elected position will have been ineffectual. Of course this is a political process; however, its intention was not the creation of a new instrument for regime change, but to open a new arena for political responsibility which accords the levers of power to the political forces which win that election -- whether they be the authorities or the opposition. By making the mayoral seat of Yerevan an elected position, a new political  contest was created, thus helping the political system and democratic processes to consolidate. However, if taken toward the other extreme such competition may further aggravate tensions, thereby defeating the original purpose. At the same time, the authorities, too, are ignoring that original purpose by lowering the plank on the Yerevan election to municipal management issues. However, reducing the entire election to an argument over the best possible property tax collector means that even before the vote itself, this new election will join all those which came before it as one more missed opportunity to register progress. The larger the number of such missed opportunities, the less chance of progress.