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Armenia’s second President Robert Kocharyan, the leader of the Armenia bloc, says the outcome of Sunday’s snap parliamentary elections in Armenia came as a surprise to them and many others. 

Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, he underlined that all public opinion polls including from MPG/Gallup, showed different results.

Kocharyan again alleged election fraud, stating his team will challenge the results of the snap polls in the Constitutional Court.

“We saw an apparent misuse of the administrative resource, so we will apply to the Constitutional Court to challenge the election results. Now we are collecting all the materials from our campaign offices, most likely in a few days we will summarize them to better understand what kind of complaint should be filed,” he said.

The Armenia bloc gained 268,165 votes or 21.04% of the vote in Sunday’s elections.

As for the 53.92% of the vote won by Nikol Pashinyan's Civil Contract Party, Kocharyan stated it “is not a trust mandate.”

In the meantime, he indicated the factor of the former authorities’ return affected the election results in a sense.

“I will tell you my personal opinion, which I have not even discussed with my colleagues, the factor of the return of the former authorities played a role here, and it significantly strengthened as a result of the participation of former presidents in the election race. We simply did not manage to break that perception, because the election campaign was very short, we did not have time, we held few meetings in rural communities. If you have paid attention, the authorities gained the highest number of votes in the villages. I think if we had another 1-2 weeks, we could change these ideas,” Kocharyan said.

Incidentally, the Armenian National Congress party, led by first President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, had 1.54% of the vote in Sunday’s elections. Third President Serzh Sargsyan’s Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) was part of the I’m Honored bloc, which gained 5.23% of the vote.