Armenian leader's party wins snap vote despite defeat in war
YEREVAN, Armenia (AP) — Results released Monday showed that the party of Armenia’s acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan won snap parliamentary elections which he called to ease anger over a peace deal he signed with Azerbaijan.
With all precincts counted, Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party won 53.9% of the vote. A bloc led by former President Robert Kocharyan was in a distant second place with about 21%, the election commission said Monday.
Pashinyan called the early election after months of protests demanding his resignation because of the peace deal that he signed to end six weeks of fighting with Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. The agreement, denounced by protesters as a betrayal of national interests, saw Azerbaijan reclaim control over large parts of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding areas that had been held by Armenian forces for more than a quarter-century.
The results of the Sunday vote, however, indicate that Pashinyan, a 46-year-old former journalist who came to power after leading large street protests in 2018 that ousted his predecessor, continued to enjoy broad support despite the humiliating defeat, with fewer Armenians willing to vote for those who ran the country before him.
“This is much less an endorsement of Pashinyan, but much more a refusal of Armenians to go back to the former authoritarian regime of the past,” Richard Giragosian, director of the Yerevan-based Regional Studies Center, told The Associated Press, adding that Kocharyan, Pashinyan's main challenger, underestimated the acting prime minister's “power and appeal.”
Nagorno-Karabakh lies within Azerbaijan but had been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by the government in Yerevan since a separatist war ended in 1994, leaving the region and substantial...