“There were fake candidates at local elections”
Talking to the journalists, Emin Yeritsyan, Chairman of Union of Communities of Armenia, said that now they are trying to work more publicly. He tried to speak about September 18 local elections in general, “The elections shouldn’t be assessed only by technique of electoral process, but also its political significance.” He also touched upon some restrictions set by the new Electoral Code, “In the communities, connected with the elections, there must be at least two candidates before the registration. It leads to devaluation of electoral process; the intention is to create competition, but it leads to a phenomenon that in order to meet that requirement of the legislation, candidates are nominated in many communities, for example employees, colleagues, and in social media language, as a result we have fake candidates. It isn’t evaluation of electoral processes; it has more negative impact. We have proposed to remove this norm.” Emin Yeritsyan also noted that these elections were different also with the fact that the candidates don’t want to be nominated by any party, they want to be self-nominated, considering it to be more beneficial. He was displeased with level of competition in the communities, “The positive thing is that we have 20-30 percent generation change in the candidates for communities’ heads.” Mr Yeritsyan also touched upon elections in 8 enlarged communities, noting that in five communities one candidate was nominated and only two candidates were nominated in one community, “It means that the parties weren’t interested even in the enlarged communities, especially in Syunik; individuals were more active. Besides, the number of women community heads is decreasing. Be the way, from the organizational point of view, these elections were better.” He says that the news on election bribes didn’t have great influence on the quality of elections.
