Azernews.Az

By Sabina Idayatova

Nomination of candidates for presidential elections due in Armenia on February 18 begins on Tuesday, December 25 and will run until January 4, ARKA news agency reported.

The candidates will be registered from January 4 to 14, while the election campaign will begin on January 21 and end at midnight on February 16. Voting tallies will be released on February 25.

The incumbent Armenian president, Serzh Sargsyan, the leader of opposition Heritage party Raffi Hovhannisyan, and former prime minister, chairman of the Freedom party Grant Bagratyan have already announced they would stand in the 2013 elections.

Former president, leader of the Armenian National Congress opposition bloc, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, who was the main rival of Sargsyan during the previous elections, held in 2008, is not expected to join the election race, Azerbaijani news agency Trend reported, referring to the tert.am website.

According to Ter-Petrosyan, Armenia's main problem is that it is a regime in which everything is concentrated in the hands of criminals who have seized power.

"Therefore, at the moment there is no demand for escaping the chaos and turning the country into a governable state, and even if there were such a demand, this would not mean necessarily that I would be the one who could meet it," he said.

Ter-Petrosyan said that just three years after his election as Armenia's president, he declared officially that he would leave politics for good, allowing a new president to be elected through free and fair elections.

Following the 2008 presidential election in Armenia, thousands of demonstrators protested for 10 days, saying the poll was rigged. The protests resulted in violent clashes that caused human casualties. Eight people were reportedly killed and 131 injured, including 33 law enforcers, during the clashes in the capital Yerevan.

A bureau of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe harshly criticized Armenia's presidential election. John Prescott, head of the PACE ad hoc committee mission that observed the polling, said 28 people had died in post-election violence instead of eight as previously reported. Eight of them were killed on public squares where the protests took place, while 20 others passed away in hospitals afterwards.

The fact that during every election year disturbances and violence occur in Armenia, with numerous protests taking the lives of demonstrators, show failure of economic, social and democratic development in the country, as well as fiasco of its foreign policy following Soviet rule. And no prospect of a turning point in this respect is discerned.