TOPIC OF THE WEEK: Dancing on a fault line-Armenia heads to the polls
With two months to election day, three key opposition centers of gravity have formed that stand reasonable chances of making it through the National Assembly, although, by law, April 23 marks the final day when blocks and coalition may be formally announced.
In this piece, I first briefly outline these three opposition contenders. More importantly, however, I go through the nitty-gritty of the complex, and somewhat opaque, electoral arithmetics to show, in a theoretical scenario, how two main technical adjustment mechanisms end up delivering a relatively easy win for the ruling Civil Contract. In effect, I demonstrate quantitatively what is usually meant in Armenia by arguments about the political fragmentation of the opposition. In my example, Civil Contract gets a simple majority of seats in the Parliament with only 26 percent of the raw vote. Incidentally, this is the average Civil Contract gets in the three recent polls released over the last month.
Two things could spoil things for Pashinyan-the opposition consolidating pre-vote into larger/fewer blocks and/or the large number of undecided voters making a choice to vote and exercising it. These two conditions, or rather their lack thereof, were key in generating the easy win for Civil Contract in the illustrative example. Ultimately, my analysis demonstrates why Civil Contract has, for now, the better chances to retain power, unless we see developments along the lines of the two requirements described above.
Now read on...
Register to sample a report