The party of Armenia’s acting PM Nikol Pashinyan has won snap elections, the country’s electoral commission says.
Preliminary results from all 2,008 polling stations give the Civil Contract party 54%, it says.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian claimed victory in Armenia’s snap parliamentary elections early on Monday, citing their official early results.
The Central Election Commission (CEC) said three hours later that with about 80percent of ballots cast counted, Pashinian’s Civil Contract party had 55.3percent of the vote. Its main opposition challenger, the Hayastan (Armenia) alliance led by former President Robert Kocharian, came in a distant second with 20.3 percent.
Another opposition force, the Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK), was falling short of a 5 percent threshold to get seats in the country’s new parliament, according to the CEC.
The official results put former President Serzh Sarkisian’s opposition Pativ Unem bloc in third place with 5.2 percent. But under Armenian law, party alliances need to poll at least 7 percent of the vote in order to be represented in the National Assembly.
The 21 other parties and blocs running in the elections fared much worse.