Is Armenia`s flight from Europe accelerating?

Proposed Constitutional reform triggers debate 

As Armenia`s parliament – the National Assembly – starts its fall session, Constitutional reform dominates the agenda. On September 3, President Serzh Sargsyan held closed-door consultations regarding the draft proposal, while parties supportive of the government are lining up behind it. 

The first announcement for Constitutional reform came on 5 September 2013 — the day after Armenia abruptly announced it would join the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union instead of signing the Association Agreement (AA) with the European Union. Opposition and civil society actors fear that the proposed constitutional changes further Armenia’s shift away from the European standards, some of which were achieved during the AA negotiations.

Armenia is quickly approaching a juncture of crucial parliamentary and presidential elections in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan is constitutionally banned from seeking a third term in office. While most post-Soviet countries have embraced super-presidential systems in the first decade of independence, at the end of their constitutional terms the sitting presidents – and their affiliated ruling parties – discover a sudden interest in parliamentary systems of governance. 

 The opposition believes that the proposed changes will not only tip the scales towards the current ruling elite, but that these changes would be nearly impossible to dislodge through democratic, constitutional processes.

On September 10, the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe issued its latest Preliminary Opinion which backs up these claims.

The key concerns that both the Venice Commission and the opposition express relate to the rules on electing the National Assembly, the ban on creating new MP factions in the sitting National Assembly, and the considerable obstacles to achieve a vote of non-confidence in the government. While the ruling party claims these provisions of the draft will ensure the stability of governance, opponents argue they will only offer the symbolic trappings of a functioning democracy, but will fall short on substance, leading to a single-party rule.

The proposal would move Armenia away from the mixed – proportional and first-past-the-post majoritarian – model, familiar to Georgian readers, to fully proportional lists. However, if no party obtains an outright majority to form the government, a second round of parliamentary elections will be held, with only the two front-runner parties participating.

This electoral innovation is as novel as it is controversial. The Venice Commission points out similarities with the recently adopted Italian model, while noting that the practice is yet to be tested there.

Further endangering political plurality are the stipulations that MPs can only be elected through proportional representation: they would not be able to change factions once elected. The Venice Commission points out that blocking factions from initiating a no confidence vote in regards to the government would result in a cumulative effect that would make the cabinet – and the powerful Prime Minister – virtually unimpeachable.

Civil society actors do not trust the government’s motives and question the integrity of the looming referendum.

Allegations of electoral fraud, corruption, misuse of government resources to support the ruling party, lack of government transparency, and limited independence of the judiciary – come up regularly and are well documented by international and civil society organisations such as Transparency International, the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum.

The proposed draft seems to represent a custom-made use of constitutional mechanisms to corrode the democratic order. Constitutional law specialist David Landau calls this “abusive constitutionalism” – a process, in which political actors appropriate democratic institutions to enact constitutional changes that are outwardly consistent with democratic obligations, but that result in practices that are significantly less democratic than before.

The implications of this draft proposal, if adopted in its current form, for the fundamental nature of Armenia’s political system are significant. For now, the government seems to be testing public reaction to the proposals. Some members of the Constitutional Commission, such as Vardan Poghosian, have floated the idea of dropping the two-party run-off clause. Simultaneously, the changes were publicly declared to provide for stipulating marriage solely as the union between a man and a woman, effectively pandering to a conservative nationalist agenda. Some analysts think that the threat of renewed protests might be enough to stop the referendum from going ahead, or to at least instigate the government to modify the draft to a considerable extent.

If, however, the proposals remain as they are, Armenia’s prospects for democracy in the future are substantially diminished while the prospects for better governance will deteriorate. The system envisioned in the proposal will tighten the lid on the pressure-cooker of Armenian politics, making it much more difficult to enact a gradual, peaceful change of government.

Karena Avedissian received her PhD from the University of Birmingham in 2015 for a thesis on social movements in the North Caucasus. Her research interests include the relationship between popular geopolitics and identity, human rights and security, and issues of governance, with a particular emphasis on Russia and Eurasia. She is based in Yerevan, Armenia.