YEREVAN. – If the election was rigged, Armenia’s opposition Heritage Party leader, former FM Raffi Hovannisian—who is declared runner-up to the winner, incumbent President Serzh Sargsyan, as a result of the presidential election that was conducted on February 18, but who claims to be the real winner in the vote and who declared a hunger strike on March 10 at capital city Yerevan’s Liberty Square—has no right to declare himself president. Social-Democratic Hnchakyan Party (SDHP) Coordinator Gurgen Yeghiazaryan said this during a press conference on Thursday.         

To the observation that First President, and former opposition bloc Armenian National Congress leader, Levon Ter-Petrosyan likewise had stated that Hovannisian was elected president, Yeghiazaryan responded as follows:

“That is Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s problem. And my problem is to say that he was not elected. No one was elected.”

To the query, in this case why were they saying—following the 2008 presidential election—that Levon Ter-Petrosyan was elected president, the SDHP official specifically said:

“At the time they began kidnapping our proxies at the precincts. They used to come, take [them] away, [and] throw [them] into their jeep. I had called the representatives of the observation mission and said there were four children in hospital, with severe head fractions.”

Yeghiazaryan added that he had been to around thirty precincts, and the ballot boxes there were full more than fifty percent, already by 11:30am.       

“These were unable to record, in the rolls, at least ten percent of the stuffed [ballots],” Gurgen Yeghiazaryan concluded.