Yerevan City Council elections were held on 17 September 2023. The Yerevan City Council comprises 65 members, including the mayor and the first deputy mayor, elected through a proportional electoral system. City Council members are elected for a five-year term.
The elections had the lowest turnout in the history of Yerevan. Civil Contract won 24 seats with 32.60 % of the votes, far short of the required 40% majority to have their leader automaticaly elected mayor, and their former ally Hanrapetutyun won 8. Together the two thus have 32 seats out of 65, one short of a majority otherwise required by the council to elect a mayor, while opposition parties held the other 33 seats. This resulted into Yerevan City Council being hung and it was unclear who would be the next mayor of Yerevan after the announcement of the preliminary results.
Background
2021 parliamentary election
After six weeks of war with Azerbaijan, on 9 November 2020 prime minister Nikol Pashinyan, president of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and Russian president Vladimir Putin reached and signed a ceasefire agreement. Following the announcement of this deal, violent protests erupted in Yerevan. The National Assembly was stormed and its speaker Ararat Mirzoyan was beaten by an angry mob.
Pashinyan faced continuous calls for his resignation and mass rallies calling for him to step down. On 25 February 2021, the Chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces Onik Gasparyan and more than 40 other top-ranking generals demanded Pashinyan's resignation, which Pashinyan described as a coup attempt, causing a political crisis that ended with Gasparyan's dismissal. On 25 April 2021, Pashinyan announced his formal resignation, prompting the dissolution of the National Assembly and the call for snap elections on 20 June of that year.
Following the snap elections, Pashinyan was re-elected to a second term, with Civil Contract receiving 54% of the vote and 71 seats, a majority in the 107-seat parliament. The opposition Armenia Alliance, finished second with 29 seats, while the I Have Honor Alliance won 7 seats. The opposition claimed there had been electoral fraud during the elections, while the OSCE assessed the election as meeting international standards and described it as; "marred by increasingly inflammatory rhetoric" but was "positive overall."
Importance of city council election
More than one-third of Armenia's electorate (824,250) lives in Yerevan, the capital city, making this the largest local election in Armenia. Yerevan's size and political influence further emphasized this election's importance, which many observers saw as a midterm assessment of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and his ruling party ahead of the next parliamentary elections to be held in 2026. In addition, the election took place in a volatile political environment, exacerbated by Armenia's conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. CivilNet Chief Karen Harutyunyan described the importance of the elections as; "The Yerevan election will be an important test of confidence for Pashinyan, who claims to have the people's full mandate to solve the Artsakh problem at any cost. This will also be a test for Armenia's fledgling democracy."
Campaign
The ruling party's mayoral candidate is Tigran Avinyan, who has been a deputy mayor since 2022. He has served as de facto acting mayor since Hracha Sargsyan's resignation in March 2023 due to low approval ratings, and has thus been in the spotlight as the primary implementer of reforms in the city and had the chance to garner support among voters. Avinyan's appointment was controversial as the normal process to replace Sargsyan was circumvented. The Electoral Code had required a special session of city council be called within one month to fill the vacancy. After Sargsyan resigned, a special session was called for April 11. However, when the day came, none of the city councilors except for Deputy Mayor Levon Hovhannisyan, who was already serving as the interim Acting Mayor showed up. Without a quorum, Hovhannisyan announced that the session was not in order and adjourned. Since that date, city council has continued to meet for regular sessions but never again placed the item of electing a new mayor on the agenda. Hovhannisyan has continued as interim Acting Mayor, while observers stated Tigran Avinyan is the one in charge. This was because the city council could not officially appoint Avinyan as the new mayor as he was not on the list of candidates in 2018.