The approval rating of Armenia’s ruling political team is rapidly declining, yet the “Civil Contract” party already has a strategy aimed at securing a successful election outcome for itself. This was stated by political scientist Grant Mikaelyan.
According to him, the authorities will seek to sow division within the opposition field, pitting the strongest protest forces against each other. “In principle, they have succeeded: in the first half of the year, the two main opposition forces were more engaged in fighting each other than opposing the ruling team. The authorities’ goal is to prevent the opposition from uniting in a single front, to maximize fragmentation of the opposition field, and thus to dilute the votes of the protest electorate,” Mikaelyan noted.
Furthermore, the authorities will make every effort to demotivate voters, particularly the protest-oriented and undecided segments of the electorate, aiming to ensure low voter turnout in the elections. In such a scenario, the votes of the ruling party’s guaranteed supporters—consumers of government propaganda, state apparatus employees, and the dependent electorate, such as welfare recipients—will carry relatively greater weight.
“In other words, a scenario similar to the Yerevan elections will be implemented, where the ruling party garnered only 9.4% of the total number of voters, but due to low turnout, this did not prevent it from securing a majority in the Yerevan Council of Elders and effectively taking control of the capital’s governance,” the political scientist emphasized.