Armenia election: PM Nikol Pashinyan wins post-war poll

The party of Armenia's acting PM Nikol Pashinyan has won snap elections, the country's electoral commission says.

Preliminary results from all 2,008 polling stations give the Civil Contract party 54%, it says.

The opposition Armenia alliance led by ex-President Robert Kocharyan is a distant second with 21%. The block has alleged election fraud.

The vote was called after Armenia's defeat in a war with Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Last year, Azerbaijan regained control of large swathes of the mountainous region, which it lost to Armenia during the first Nagorno-Karabakh war in 1988-94.

The region is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan.

Earlier on Monday, Mr Pashinyan declared victory in the elections, urging supporters to gather in the main square of the capital Yerevan in the evening.

"The people of Armenia gave our Civil Contract party a mandate to lead the country and personally me to lead the country as prime minister," he said.

"We already know that we won a convincing victory in the elections and we will have a convincing majority in parliament."

Almost 50% of the country's 2.6 million eligible voters cast ballots on Sunday, Armenian election officials said, adding that the vote was carried out in accordance with legislation.

Mr Kocharyan's alliance said it would not recognise Mr Pashinyan's claim of victory.

"Hundreds of signals from polling stations testifying to organised and planned falsifications serve as a serious reason for lack of trust," the bloc said in a statement.

On Sunday evening the general prosecutor's office said it had received 319 reports of violations, and had opened six criminal investigations. All of these were related to alleged bribery during campaigning.

Mr Kocharyan, a friend and ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was himself previously accused of fixing a presidential election in favour of a political ally.

He was also accused of presiding over a deadly crackdown on protesters in 2008.

Mr Pashinyan came to power after leading a popular revolution in 2018, and Armenia was praised by some international countries when it held its first free and fair election under his leadership that year.

But the country has been in a political crisis since November 2020, when Mr Pashinyan signed a Moscow-brokered truce with Azerbaijan to end the Nagorno-Karabakh war.

Officially, 2,904 Azerbaijani servicemen lost their lives in last year's war. Armenia lost an estimated 4,000 servicemen.