On June 14, the Central Electoral Commission refused to hold a repeat vote in the three polling stations where the voting results had been invalidated, thereby effectively excluding Prosperous Armenia from parliament and securing 3/5 of the mandates for Civil Contract. The Electoral Code of the Republic of Armenia clearly stipulates that if the annulled results could alter the overall distribution of mandates, a repeat vote must be held. This direct legal requirement was bypassed by the CEC composition appointed by Civil Contract, arguing that “the invalidation of voting results in polling stations No. 12/13, 10/51, and 36/65 does not affect the election results,” and that “a repeat vote could violate voter equality, as one group of voters would find itself in substantially different initial conditions from others.”
Article 101 of the Electoral Code provides for a repeat vote precisely as a mechanism to restore violated fairness, yet the CEC refused to use that mechanism, claiming that the mechanism itself could not ensure fairness. It is particularly noteworthy that prior to this, although the Administrative Court rejected the lawsuit of Prosperous Armenia, it nevertheless acknowledged that violations had occurred and that a repeat vote was necessary.
However, the June 14 decision, despite all its absurdity, should be viewed as part of a larger architecture rather than as an isolated case. What has happened to Armenia’s political system from 2018–2026 is described in the 2018 work How Democracies Die by Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. According to the central thesis of the work, the main distinguishing feature of modern 21st-century dictatorship is that authoritarian regimes no longer come to power through military coups. They come through elections, and institutions are dismantled gradually, within the framework of legal procedures. Earlier, in a 2010 work, Levitsky and his colleague Lucan Way formulated the name for such a regime: “Competitive Authoritarianism.” This is a condition in which formal elections are preserved, but there is no balance of power in the political arena. The opposition may participate in elections, but cannot genuinely compete for victory because the courts, state apparatus, electoral bodies, and major media outlets are subordinate to the authorities.
These two works demonstrate that democracy is not merely a government elected by a majority (however widely that falsehood may be spread by competitive authoritarian regimes and their supporters), but also requires a number of other essential conditions:
- Separation of powers,
- Independent and depoliticized courts,
Independent state institutions, - The possibility for the opposition to engage in legitimate political struggle,
- Freedom of the press,
- The ability of electoral bodies to act in accordance with the law.
In addition, Levitsky and Ziblatt identified four main indicators of democratic erosion:
- Denial of the legitimacy of the opposition (presenting the opposition not as an alternative, but as a threat — a “three-headed war party” whose return would mean “the destruction of Armenia and the loss of sovereignty”);
- Tolerance of violence against political rivals (the arrests of numerous opposition figures, including the leader of the main opposition force, and labeling them as terrorists, bribe distributors, and foreign agents without proving those accusations);
- Restriction of civil liberties (pressure on the Church, preventing opposition priests from conducting religious ceremonies in certain churches, blackmail, smear campaigns, and dismissals of state employees holding opposition views);
- Restriction of political competition (the “subordination” of the three branches of government to one person, numerous criminal cases with obvious political motives, and the CEC’s June 14 decision, which was based not on law but on political expediency).
Supporters of Armenia’s “democracy” may say that “no significant violations were recorded on June 7, the actual voting day.” Yes, but the problem is deeper. The entire essence of modern competitive authoritarianism is that violations do NOT occur on election day. They occur six months, one year, or eight years before elections: opposition activists are arrested, courts are subordinated, the opposition is portrayed as a threat, opposition media are subjected to pressure, voters are mobilized through fear, and society is constantly fed narratives about internal and external “enemies” (former authorities, Russia, the Artsakh elite, oligarchs, etc.). As a result, election day becomes a formal procedure whose outcome has already been predetermined.
Leaving aside already established authoritarian systems, let us consider Poland from 2015-2023 as an example. The officially elected Law and Justice party (PiS, Jarosław Kaczyński) “captured” the Constitutional Tribunal within two years through special appointments (and when the Tribunal issued rulings against the government during that period, the government simply refused to recognize their legality), merged the Prosecutor’s Office and the Ministry of Justice in 2016 (effectively turning the Prosecutor’s Office into a political body), lowered the retirement age threshold for Supreme Court judges in 2017–2018, thereby removing 27 unwanted judges, and through legislative changes authorized the Treasury Minister to directly appoint the heads of state media outlets (more than 160 journalists lost their jobs within a short period), transforming state media into a propaganda machine for the authorities. During that time, five nationwide elections took place in the country, which outwardly appeared more than democratic. However, unlike the processes taking place in Armenia, the European Union’s interests in Poland were different, and as a result, the EU froze €137 billion in funding allocated to Poland due to the undermining of judicial independence. Those funds were unfrozen only after PiS’s defeat in the 2023 elections.
The above demonstrates that election violations recorded on voting day are not a defining feature of modern competitive authoritarianism. On the contrary, competitive authoritarian regimes avoid election fraud on voting day as much as possible because the result has already been secured. This was also the case in Hungary from 2010-2026, in Russia during the 2000s, in Serbia, in Turkey (especially after 2016), and elsewhere.
P.S. “Democracies do not die through coups. They die through the gradual, barely noticeable actions of legally elected governments. Each step, taken individually, appears acceptable. The totality of those steps becomes insurmountable.” – Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die.
Levon Zargaryan
Yerevan
Orer.eu
