By Mark Dovich
Hayk Marutyan, a former Yerevan mayor turned government critic, said Wednesday he plans to contest Armenia’s next parliamentary elections, after being ousted as a member of Yerevan city council in a vote he decried as politically motivated.
“This is an attempt to deprive the opposition of a fighting platform. Do you think you’re my employer? My employer is my voters,” Marutyan said after the 65-member council expelled him in a 34-0 vote.
The council’s ruling Civil Contract party, which led the ouster, cited Marutyan’s absenteeism. Marutyan and 25 other lawmakers from the council’s two main opposition parties have been boycotting legislative meetings in protest of the government’s policies.
Wednesday’s session took place after two members of a third, smaller opposition party defied calls by their influential former leader to boycott the vote. Had they skipped, the chamber would have failed to meet quorum, putting all municipal business on hold.
Aside from Marutyan, the council Wednesday expelled two other opposition members, Sona Aghekyan and Narine Hayrapetyan. Two more opposition lawmakers whose heads were on the chopping block were spared.
In addition to announcing plans to run in Armenia’s next parliamentary elections, expected in 2026, Marutyan pledged to begin organizing protests against plans to raise public transport fares in Yerevan.
City hall is set to approve the price hike, which would increase the average cost of a ride by 80%, next week. The changes would go into effect later this year.
Public transport price hikes remain a sensitive issue in Yerevan, where hundreds of thousands of residents commute. The city saw large protests a decade ago against a proposal to raise fares by just 50%. Those plans were eventually scrapped.
Who’s Hayk Marutyan?
Marutyan led Yerevan from 2018 to 2021, when he was similarly ousted from his post in a no-confidence vote put forward by Civil Contract that was widely seen as politically motivated.
It marked a stunning turn of events for Marutyan, who was once viewed as one of Nikol Pashinyan’s closest political allies, but broke with the prime minister after Armenia’s disastrous defeat to Azerbaijan in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war.
Marutyan was a regular fixture at the 2018 rallies that rocked Armenia, and his landslide victory later that year in Yerevan’s city council elections presaged Pashinyan’s sweep of parliament fewer than three months later.
Before entering politics, Marutyan enjoyed a successful and profitable career in entertainment as one of Armenia’s leading comedic actors, becoming a household name in the country.
What’s the context?
Marutyan mounted an unsuccessful bid to topple Civil Contract and regain control of Yerevan in local elections last September.
Those polls saw Civil Contract lose its majority on the council, even while securing the highest vote share of any single party, at about 33%, allowing it to retain control of city hall.
In spite of record low turnout and “the misuse of administrative resources by the ruling party,” the elections were “generally considered free and fair, with no major systemic violations observed,” monitors said.
The elections fell back under the spotlight last week when a local news organization published an investigation alleging Civil Contract accepted campaign donations made under falsified names.
Those polls marked the latest in a string of failures for Civil Contract in highly competitive local elections, despite the party’s nationwide victory in Armenia’s latest parliament elections in 2021.
In a number of those municipalities, Civil Contract has since appeared to obstruct or undermine the democratic process after elections produced results favoring its opponents.
Most recently last December, local Civil Contract lawmakers brought down the prominent opposition mayor of a northern mining town in a vote of no confidence. Council members then moved immediately to install a Civil Contract member as mayor.
“Civil Contract members have allowed Alaverdi to collapse for the sake of their own ambition,” then-Mayor Arkadi Tamazyan told CivilNet before the vote. “Is this what Mr. Pashinyan’s democracy, which he talks about endlessly, looks like?”
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