Armenian presidential election, 2003
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| 2003-2004 Armenian protests | |||
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| Part of the impact of the Georgian Rose Revolution | |||
| Date | February 20, 2003 – April 21, 2004 (1 year, 2 months and 1 day) |
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| Location | Yerevan, Armenia | ||
| Causes | alleged electoral fraud during | ||
| Goals | resignation of President Robert Kocharyan and new general elections | ||
| Methods | demonstrations | ||
| Result | Protests suppressed by force | ||
| Parties to the civil conflict | |||
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The 2003 Armenian Presidential election took place in Armenia on 19 February and 5 March 2003. No candidate received a majority in the first round of the election with the incumbent President Robert Kocharyan winning slightly under 50% of the vote. Therefore, a second round was held and Kocharyan defeated Stepan Demirchyan with official results showed him winning just over 67% of the vote. However both the opposition and international observers said that the election had seen significant amounts of electoral fraud and the opposition did not recognise the results of the election.
Robert Kocharyan had been elected president in the 1998 presidential election defeating Karen Demirchyan. The election had been held when Levon Ter-Petrossian was forced to resign as President after agreeing to a plan to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which his ministers, including Kocharyan, had refused to accept.
On the 7 August 2002 the Central Election Commission of Armenia announced that the presidential election would be held on the 19 February 2003, with nominations required by 6 December 2002. Candidates had to supply 40,000 signatures of support in order to be able to stand in the election.
President Kocharyan had already announced that he would be running for re-election and the opposition parties attempted to agree on a united candidate to oppose him but were unsuccessful. Former President Levon Ter-Petrossian also contemplated running in the election but ultimately decided not to stand.
15 people announced that they would stand in election, but in the end 9 candidates stood in the first round of the presidential election. Reporting in the media was seen as being one-sided, with a media monitoring organisation saying that President Kocharyan received about five times as much coverage during the campaign as all the other eight candidates combined. Kocharyan campaigned on the record of economic growth during his presidency and got support from several political parties, while his campaign was run by the defence minister Serzh Sargsyan. Kocharyan's leading opponent was Stepan Demirchyan, the leader of the People's Party of Armenia and the son of Karen Demirchyan, a former Soviet leader of Armenia and speaker of the Armenian parliament who had been assassinated in 1999. Demirchyan ran in the election as an anti-corruption candidate. The other leading candidate was Artashes Geghamyan a former mayor of Yerevan, from the National Unity party.
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Wikipedia