Epress.am News from Armenia
From a political perspective, moving to 100% party-list proportional representation in parliament is inadvisable, said head of the parliamentary Standing Committee on State and Legal Affairs, Republican Party of Armenia MP Davit Harutyunyan today during a parliamentary discussion of voting systems initiated by the opposition Heritage Party.
In his opinion, the ruling party considers the current model most desirable. Note, out of 131 parliamentary seats, 41 are elected by majority ballot and 90 by party-list proportional representation. In Armenia, citizens vote for individual candidates on the majority ballot, but vote for political parties on the proportional ballot. Opposition parties, such as the Heritage Party, support a move to a 100% proportional representation system as they believe the majority seats are biased in favor of larger political groups and, in Armenia’s case, in favor of oligarchs.
Harutyunyan disagreed with the the view that those who have a “criminal nature” are those who mainly secure seats in parliament on the majority ballot, saying, in fact, such individuals get in parliament more so through proportional representation than on the majority ticket.
“The political majority in the National Assembly is formed due to lawmakers elected on the majority ballot,” he said.
In response, Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) MP Vahan Hovhannisyan said that with this statement, Harutyunyan basically confessed that the current ruling authorities will hold the parliamentary majority and it’s not possible to achieve power in Armenia without bloodshed.
Hovhannisyan added that this can be asserted also based on the fact that the bill on the rule of law during a state of emergency was discussed in parliament today.