The fact writes:
In principle, it is unprecedented that 7 of the 18 political forces that participated in the national elections appealed to the Constitutional Court, disputing the results of the elections and the decision made by the CEC regarding them. If we remove from the mentioned 18 or put aside Pashinyan's ruling CP and its "satellites", it turns out that more than half of the forces that participated in the elections dispute the results and legitimacy of what happened. The reformist party "New Power" and, strange as it may sound, the "Alliance of Defenders of Democracy for the Republic".
As it is known, the CC has combined the applications of all 7 forces and will examine them on June 26 in an oral procedure. If we leave aside the last political unit from the listed series, we will see that the main opposition forces, also those that are somewhat oppositional, but received relatively few votes, dispute the results of the June 7 election.
According to that, the disputants have more than enough grounds for this, which we will discuss further. By and large, if we talk purely mathematically, even according to the data officially published by the CEC, the official election results and the legitimacy of these elections are contested by forces that received around 630 thousand votes. This in itself suggests that there were significant problems in the electoral process that distorted or distorted the image of the will of the voters. From a political point of view, the official results of the June 7 elections do not reflect the true image of public sentiment. And this is the most important problem.
A problem that has put the country in front of the political crisis of having an illegitimate government, according to which it has not yet overcome or resolved the comprehensive crisis from the previous period. As for the current composition of the Constitutional Court, it is clear that only the incorrigibly naive can have serious expectations. The point is that the current composition of the CC is largely appointed by the CP, in the line of "appropriation" of the judicial system by Nikol Pashinyan. Moreover, there are judges in the CC who were directly involved in the activities of CP (faction) and the ruling "Republic" party not so long ago. And the decision made that Vladimir Vardanyan and Artak Zeynalyan will not participate in the investigation of the "election case" is logical. And as logical as it is, it is equally unclear why exactly such a decision was not made regarding another judge of the CC, Seda Safaryan, because he was once (in 2021) a candidate for parliament with the Arman Babajanyan-Shirinyan alliance, and Babajanyan is one of the applicants to the CC in that "case". Yesterday, it became known that the "Armenia" alliance will submit an application to the Supreme Court, so that Seda Safaryan will not participate in the examination of the case of contesting the results of the elections.
Returning to the main issue, let's note that the political forces and their leaders and representatives who appealed to the CC are certainly not naive. It is simply the outlined legal, legal-political path if you will. if they do not agree with the published official results of the elections, then the place to challenge them is the Constitutional Court. In other words, in order to make new legal and political evaluations and apply the resulting actions in the future, the procedure must first be kept. It should be believed that the approach of the main forces of the opposition is in that circle. Along with all this, there is also an equally important circumstance related to the contested elections.
There is a common misconception among us that election is primarily voting. However, it is not so, to put it mildly. Voting is only one of the important stages of the electoral process. The mentioned misunderstanding, by the way, extends to the entire electoral process. That is, when people say "dirty elections", "falsified elections", many imagine ballot box stuffing, "carousel", falsification of the number of ballots, etc. Of course, all of them are election violations. But at least now they are not the most basic, moreover, we hope that most of them have remained in the past. It is certainly not about manipulating numbers. This, as we understand, has by no means remained in the past. In short, from a purely "stuffing" or "carousel" point of view, there may not have been any particular problems. Nevertheless, these last elections do not stop claiming the "laurels" of being impure, not free, and falsified.
Even the fact of stopping the summary during the night and publishing the numbers only in the morning is worth it. We are still not talking about the decision of the Central Election Commission to arbitrarily nullify the results of 3 precincts and reject the re-voting with ridiculous "justifications". But the "election process" itself is much more spatial and comprehensive, even if we take it only from the pre-election campaign period. And in order for that process to be democratic or to meet the standards of democracy, several important conditions are necessary, for example, having equal conditions of competition, the significant limitation or exclusion of the possibility of using administrative resources by the government, the impartiality of law enforcement and investigative bodies. Things that are by no means guaranteed in 2026. Quite the opposite.
In other words, the main opposition forces and the government, as well as other competing forces, had unequal conditions, the actual leader of one of the main opposition forces was deprived of the opportunity to freely meet with the voters in the same format. The Pashinyan government completely misused the administrative resource. The law enforcement and investigative and repressive bodies exclusively targeted the opposition forces, many representatives and figures of all the main opposition forces were targeted and arrested, especially those who were active-organizers, representatives of pre-election headquarters on a national or local scale.
Meanwhile, such restrictions and sanctions were not applied to the government and CP leaders, even in the case of physical retaliation against competitors and overt manifestations of threatening their lives. Levon Zargarian's analytical review based on Harvard University political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's work "How Democracies Die" attracted attention from this point of view. What is it about? To put it very briefly, we are talking about the illusion of democracy or, in the words of the mentioned political scientists, "competitive authoritarianism".
They give 4 main characteristics of "dying democracy". a) denial of the legitimacy of the opposition ("three-headed party of war", etc.), b) permissibility of violence against political rivals (opposition) (arrests, labeling them as "terrorists", "electoral bribe givers", even "foreign agents", naturally, without evidence), c) restriction of civil liberties (pressure against the Church, blackmail, discredit campaigns, dismissal of opposition supporters) pressures, even an entire department of the university was dissolved), d) limitation of political competition.
It can be said that this year's electoral processes in Armenia took place using all the features outlined by the aforementioned political scientists. And in sum, it led to the death of "Armenian democracy" or at least acute toxicosis. To put it more simply, the once "bastion of democracy" has remained only a "bastion" with rusty barbed wire of authoritarianism and dictatorship.
