RAFFI HOVANNISIAN PESSIMISTIC ON YEREVAN ELECTION

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 YEREVAN 000370 SIPDIS E.O. 12958: DECL: 05/27/2019 TAGS: PGOV PHUM KDEM KJUS AM SUBJECT: RAFFI HOVANNISIAN PESSIMISTIC ON YEREVAN ELECTION YEREVAN 00000370 001.2 OF 003 Classified By: AMB Marie L. Yovanovitch, reasons 1.4 (b/d). -------------- SUMMARY -------------- ¶1. (C) Armenia's first foreign minister and current leader of the opposition Heritage Party, Raffi Hovannisian, told the Ambassador that the ruling Republican Party of Armenia was resorting to fraud to win the Yerevan election. He predicted the Armenian National Congress led by ex-President Levon Ter-Petrossian (LTP) would nonetheless finish a close third to the top two ruling parties. He said he was surprised by the early "peaking" of violence in the election campaign, and that it was occurring between the two ruling parties. He described his party's decision not to run in the election as a reaction to LTP's inflexibility and unwarranted attacks on his party. Hovannisian said Heritage planned to actively monitor the conduct of the election through its seats on the electoral commissions in Yerevan's 439 voting precincts. END SUMMARY. -------------- CORE ISSUES DEPEND ON VOTERS' PERSPECTIVES -------------- ¶2. (C) On May 22 the Ambassador invited U.S.-born Raffi Hovannisian, Armenia's first foreign minister and current leader of the opposition Heritage party, and his spouse Armine for lunch to hear the Hovannisians' views on Turkey-Armenia rapprochement (septel) and the upcoming Yerevan mayoral election. Hovannisian said the core issues of the election depend on the perspective of the individual voters. For those voters with a "macro" approach toward change, LTP would probably be their choice; for those voters focused on local issues like having their streets repaired, they would likely pick the ruling parties who Hovannisian sarcastically claimed had "millions" added to their campaign war chests by the government to win over voters with local beautification projects. -------------- ELECTION DIFFERENT THIS TIME AROUND? -------------- ¶3. (C) Armine Hovannisian thought the ruling Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) headed by President Sargsian and represented by incumbent Yerevan mayor Gagik Beglarian in the election have become more sophisticated campaigners since the 2008 presidential election. "Instead of forcing people to come to rallies, and using muscle," she said the RPA and Beglarian were being "more intelligent," and staging smaller grassroots campaign appearances where Beglarian, who is rumored to associate with criminal elements, was surrounding himself with "intelligentsia." ¶4. (C) Raffi Hovannisian disagreed, arguing that the two ruling parties still had dirty tricks up their sleeves, and claimed that representatives of both parties had contacted him with handsome offers to buy Heritage's electoral commission seats in Yerevan's 439 polling stations. "If the Republicans and Prosperous Armenia are so confident of winning, they wouldn't be contacting me," Hovannisian said. Hovannisian also highlighted the recent alleged intimidation by the RPA and PA of the Heritage representative at one of Yerevan's 13 Territorial Electoral Commissions (TEC) which resulted in the representative seeking refuge in a local hospital at the time of a TEC meeting. The purpose of that meeting was to determine the composition of members of that TEC's numerous polling stations, or Precinct Electoral Commissions (PECs). In the absence of the member from Heritage, the RPA and PA moved in -- as is permitted by the Electoral Code -- and proceeded to assign their own activists to the seats that Heritage should have occupied in those PECs. -------------- WHY HERITAGE CHOSE NOT TO RUN -------------- ¶5. (C) Hovannisian told the Ambassador he had personally opposed his party's decision not to contest the election. But he deferred to the decision of the party's board, which decided -- after failed negotiations with the LTP-led Armenian National Congress (ANC) -- to bow out of the race. He detailed his unsuccessful efforts to persuade LTP to jointly support two up-and-coming young reformers from Heritage by making them the top two candidates on a party list, with LTP and Hovannisian taking the third and fourth spots. But Hovannisian said LTP would have none of it, and instead presented an ultimatum to Heritage that he and Stepan Demirchian (head of the LTP-allied People's Party of Armenia) YEREVAN 00000370 002.2 OF 003 top the list, with the reformers further down the list. Hovannisian deplored the media attacks that the ANC directed against Heritage after it decided not to unite, and said "a country's political opposition should support freedom of expression -- not attack it." Hovannisian said, in the end, Heritage decided to issue a general endorsement of the opposition, but not explicitly for the ANC. He said the party would pursue an active role in supervising the conduct of the election through its seats on the electoral commissions in Yerevan's 439 PECs. -------------- LTP'S "SECOND ROUND" STRATEGY WON'T WORK -------------- ¶6. (C) Hovannisian disagreed with the ANC's decision to approach, and tout, the election as the "second round" of last year's disputed presidential election. He said the risky strategy hadn't resonated with voters during the campaign, and it also begged the question of what the ANC had planned for June 1, the day after the election. (Hovannisian's reference was to LTP's post-election protests in 2008 that resulted in fatal clashes between opposition supporters and security forces on March 1). -------------- PREDICTIONS -------------- ¶7. (C) Hovannisian and his wife predicted that the RPA's Beglarian would be the next mayor, thanks in large part to the party's overwhelming access to, and use of administrative resources, as well as fraud on Election Day. Both thought PA would try to make a serious move on the RPA during the election, with Hovannisian saying PA had approached him for Heritage's PEC seats "not to jockey against the ANC, but against the Republicans." He predicted that the RPA, PA, and ANC would finish close to each other in percentage of voters, so that the newly composed city council would actually have to vote for the new mayor -- instead of the mayor automatically coming from the top of the list of the party that would win a majority of the votes. Hovannisian also predicted that the Armenian Revolutionary Federation - Dashnaktsutiun (Dashnaks) might not make the minimum threshold of seven percent required to win seats on the council. He said the remaining three parties would definitely not meet the threshold. -------------- POTENTIAL FOR VIOLENCE -------------- ¶8. (C) Hovannisian said that while the ruling parties might be showing more finesse and subtlety in their pre-election fraud, he has been taken aback by the pre-election violence between the RPA and PA. Noting that violence usually breaks out the day after elections in Armenia, "it is peaking earlier" in this election. He added that "there is already the potential for the outbreak of violence on Election Day, but not in the classical mode of government versus opposition," but between the top two ruling parties themselves. Hovannisian spoke at length about the current dynamics between the ruling parties' leaders (septel),and his wife Armine, who went to school with some of them, said that PA was spoiling for a fight this time, and predicted that PA would not hand over its votes to RPA as has been the practice in recent elections. -------------- CHOOSE POST-ELECTION WORDS CAREFULLY -------------- ¶9. (C) Armine Hovannisian said she was concerned how the West would react to the conduct of the election, and pointed to the initial assessment of the disputed 2008 presidential election by OSCE/ODIHR that said the election had been conducted "mostly in line" with international standards. Not only was the assessment wrong, she claimed, but such pronouncements by the West on Armenia's elections "hurt the opposition" when the authorities subsequently use them to defend the flawed results. She said that sometimes it is better to say nothing at all. -------------- COMMENT -------------- ¶10. (C) An Armenian-American emigre to Armenia who renounced his U.S. citizenship in the 1990s to position himself for a run at Armenia's presidency, Hovannisian is an aberration in the rough-and-tumble politics of post-Soviet Armenia. While Armenian-born politicians run fast and dirty, Hovannisian has YEREVAN 00000370 003.2 OF 003 remained faithful to his decades-long goal of transforming Armenia's deformed political culture. Barred from running for president last year on an immigration technicality, it is widely assumed that the authorities will never permit the reformist Hovannisian a chance at the country's top posts. One gets the impression in speaking with him that Hovannisian realizes his boat has sailed, and that he is now focused on grooming young, reform-minded, local politicians to overturn the paradigm that has bedeviled his ancestral homeland. YOVANOVITCH