Armenia’s ruling Civil Contract party appears to lose two local snap elections

The ruling Civil Contract party appears to have lost two local snap elections on Sunday, according to the preliminary results, with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, also from Civil Contract, congratulating the winners.

Although Civil Contract received the highest number of votes — over 17,000 — in Gyumri, Armenia’s second largest city, it still failed to garner over 50% of votes.

Nine candidates were competing in Gyumri, with five political forces garnering sufficient votes to overcome the voting threshold to enter the city council. The groups will now have to form coalitions in order to elect a mayor.  Armenpress reported that four opposition parties had earlier announced that they would not form a coalition with Civil Contract.

The Communist Party of Armenia, with its mayoral candidate Vardan Ghukasyan, a former Mayor of Gyumri, came in second with nearly 10,000 votes, followed by the Our City alliance with over 7,000 votes, then the My Strong Community party, with nearly 4,000, and finally the Mother Armenia alliance, which garnered nearly 3,000 votes.

On Monday, two opposition forces — Mother Armenia and the My Strong Community — expressed their support for Ghukasyan, who received the highest amount of votes among the opposition candidates.

Andranik Tevanyan, the leader of Mother Armenia, also expressed the party’s readiness to mediate the talks with other opposition forces and act as a ‘guarantor of the agreements that can be reached’.

Our City has not yet expressed its position, without the support of which the Gyumri City Council will be unable to select the next mayor.

On Monday afternoon, the mayoral candidate of Our City, Martun Grigoryan, made a brief post on Facebook, reaffirming that ‘there will be no mayor in Gyumri from the [Civil Contract] party — this is certain.’

In an election held the same day in the administration of Parakar, the opposition Unity alliance exceeded 50% of the total. The candidate for the Civil Contract party resigned from the post of mayor in November 2024.

On Monday, Pashinyan wrote that the Armenian citizen ‘has the chance to freely make a choice’ and that their choice ‘is our law’.

‘All reports about illegal influence on the will of voters must be investigated in detail with the primary goal of ruling out repetition’, Pashinyan said.

Political analyst Hakob Badalyan wrote on Telegram that Pashinyan did not attend the final rally of Civil Contract’s Gyumri candidate as ‘the expectation of success [was] almost zero’ and that he tried to ‘stay as far away from failure as possible’.

According to Badalyan, the Gyumri election would serve as ‘a reason, or perhaps more of an opportunity, to start “purges” within [Civil Contract]. Pashinyan, of course, started working in that direction much earlier, that is, the process of forming a new team and profile for [the] 2026 [parliamentary elections]’.

Background and scandals

Prior to the elections, there were several developments in Gyumri, including arrests for election bribery charges and the circulation of discrediting videos.

On 27 March, the Anti-Corruption Committee announced that criminal proceedings were initiated against eight people on charges of giving, receiving, and preparing to give electoral bribes. Three of them reportedly ‘gave confessional statements’. All eight were detained, but have since been released.

As part of the criminal proceeding, searches were conducted in the offices of the two opposition forces — Mother Armenia and Our City, while among those detained were the father and son of the head of the Our City bloc, Grigoryan.

The next day, pro-government media circulated a video, with a caption claiming that Ghukasyan’s great-nephew, together with his friends, ‘kidnapped a young girl, stripped her, and performed sexual acts on her, which he and his friends filmed, and the videos appeared on Azerbaijani Telegram channels’.

The Civil Contract affiliated media, civic.am posed a question — ‘It's interesting to see which girl’s parent from Gyumri will vote for the return of the [Ghukasyan] clan after watching this video’.

Previously, before the election campaign, Ghukasyan and his bodyguard Tigran Simonyan were arrested on suspicion of carrying illegal weapons and ammunition. The two were later released, with Ghukasyan claiming the detentions were a form of political pressure.

Gyumri’s former mayor arrested on weapons charges, released ahead of local elections

The incident took place prior to the Gyumri elections, scheduled to be held on 30 March.

OC MediaArshaluys Barseghyan

Other candidates have been implicated in similar investigations.

The head of the My Strong Community, Ruben Mkhitaryan, was ‘invited’ by the Investigative Committee for questioning, with the Committee telling Armenpress on 20 March that the reason for this was a criminal proceeding initiated around a year ago. Mkhitaryan, according to the authorities, drove a car in early May 2024, ‘while his right to drive vehicles was suspended for a period of six months’.

The political crisis in Gyumri began in October 2024 when Civil Contract announced the termination of a cooperation memorandum signed in 2021 on the joint administration of Gyumri and the resignation of Gyumri’s two deputy mayors. The ruling party claimed that the reason behind these decisions was that Gyumri was ‘under shadow management’, but did not clarify who or what specifically they meant by this.

The final round of the crisis kicked off when criminal charges were brought against former Gyumri Mayor Samvel Balasanyan, Balasanyan’s son, and their associates. Balasanyan was Gyumri’s mayor from 2012 to 2021.

A few weeks later, Gyumri’s then-Mayor Vardges Samsonyan and all 13 council members of the Balasanyan Alliance, affiliated with Balasanyan, submitted their resignations without any public comment on their decision.

Gyumri’s mayor and ruling faction announce their resignation

The mayor of Gyumri, Armenia and 13 council members have submitted their resignations after the authorities accused the former mayor, Samvel Balasanyan, who is affiliated with their faction, of abusing his office. Mayor Vardges Samsonyan and the council members, who call themselves the Balasanyan…

OC MediaArshaluys Barseghyan