For the last week Bart and I have been in Armenia for a joint seminar with Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty and the VVD, but also to witness the presidential elections. Together with participants from the Armenian National Movement, the Georgian Young Republicans and representatives from Abkhazia we discussed different aspects of election observing. As a part of that seminar, I held a lecture about the many varieties of election fraud and how to prevent them. I ended the lecture with the conclusion that there are many different effective and efficient ways to prevent election fraud, but most of them need to be backed and introduced by the government. After the seminar we unfortunately had to find out that the governing regime in Armenia apparently not only has low incentives to work against election fraud, but rather uses the various gaps in the current system for its own purposes. On election day, we heard several reports about election fraud and numerous irregularities, so the “official” result of the elections - the overwhelming victory of the government candidate Serzh Sargsyan - did not come as a surprise to us. However, after having seen the vast support that the main opposition candidate Levon Ter-Petrossian received during his rallies it is very hard to believe that the results given by the election commission are even anywhere close to reality.

Personally I was very disappointed also by the international media coverage of the election result especially in European print media. Most journalists apparently did not even care to read the OSCE Election Observation Mission's report, that stated numerous observed flaws and irregularities - but concluded right away that the elections "mostly" had been fair. I had expected that even an average journalist would be able to see the clearly listed facts in the report even though the OSCE naturally used the usual rather diplomatic terms to describe the situation (actually the report and the press conference where very explicit when you compare them to the standard the OSCE normally uses). However, I unfortunately was wrong.

Overall the elections where a big disappointment to all of us who had hoped for free and fair processes but I am convinced and I hope that the democratic forces in Armenia will continue their struggle - we will support them wherever we can.