President’s Popularity Is Armenian Election Issue

The cost of having a job is getting so prohibitive for Suren Sheyranyan that he says he would quit and do nothing if not for his self-respect.

An engineer with no employment prospects in impoverished Armenia, he spends weeks working construction jobs in faraway Moscow for cut-rate wages that barely cover the cost of an occasional flight home to Yerevan and the $2 daily visitor’s tax charged to out-of-towners in the Russian capital.

“A man has to work, but this is an absurd way to live,” the 45-year-old with a wife and two children says on a visit home to cast his vote in Sunday’s presidential election.

Fed up with the snail’s pace of post-Communist recovery in his homeland, he plans to join masses of other frustrated Armenians in voting for Vazgen Manukyan, a former prime minister who is challenging incumbent President Levon A. Ter-Petrosyan.

An unusual display of unity among Armenia’s scattered political forces has presented Ter-Petrosyan with the first serious challenge to his leadership in the five years since Armenia broke free of the Soviet Union.

Ter-Petrosyan’s supporters and some independent analysts warn that this tiny country wedged between hostile neighbors will only suffer further detours along the road to prosperity if it changes political course just as it has begun to rebound after having hit bottom.

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Predictions on the outcome are precarious; opinion polls here are shamelessly partisan. The ruling Pan-Armenian National Movement is forecasting as much as a 60% share for Ter-Petrosyan, while surveys conducted by the opposition coalition, calling itself the Government for National Accord, indicate that Manukyan will win on the first ballot.

A Communist Party candidate and one opposition holdout threaten to prevent either of the two front-runners from winning an outright majority Sunday. But most observers expect the incumbent to prevail on the strength of his broader access to the media and general public reluctance to encourage further upheaval.

Unlike this summer’s contest of extremes in the Russian presidential election, Ter-Petrosyan and Manukyan have little ideological distance between them. Both are articulate academics who advocate free-market reforms, with the 50-year-old mathematician-challenger pushing a more populist program, promising higher wages and subsidies than Ter-Petrosyan, 51, a scholar of literature.

The absence of radical differences between the main candidates has transformed the election into a referendum on the incumbent’s track record at a time when many Armenians are disenchanted and apathetic.

“I think the current president has done as good a job as anyone could under the circumstances. At least our stores are full now, and the electricity has been switched on,” says Tamara Akopyan, 36, a nurse who adds that she has absolutely no intention of voting.

Others who do plan to cast ballots say Ter-Petrosyan has had his chance to lead Armenia out of its economic doldrums and now it is time to give someone else the reins of power.

“It is the fault of the president that the country is in this condition,” Sheyranyan says. “He’s the driver and we’re the passengers. If we don’t get anywhere, he is the one who is responsible for that failure.”

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Retired geologist Aida Isahakyan, 64, has three grown children with college educations, but none can find work here.

Her youngest son works as a “shuttle trader,” running goods between Mediterranean producers and Russian markets and sending home $60 to $80 a month to his parents and siblings.

“It is very important to get industry working again. Otherwise we will continue to lose our young people to foreign countries,” says Isahakyan, who with her husband earned the equivalent of $1,600 a month during the height of their careers in the waning days of the Soviet Union.

An itinerant life is not unusual for Armenian men, who often feel forced to look abroad for employment as their homeland suffers at least 30% unemployment and as the average income for those who do have work hovers below $60 a month. Estimates of the number of citizens working abroad range upward of 400,000--a huge share of the labor force in a country of only 3.6 million.

Economist Armen Yeghiazaryan notes that foreign earnings, plus an estimated $10 million per month in remittances from Armenian relatives permanently living abroad, make up as much as 70% of family income, a situation he describes as lifesaving but abnormal.

But he argues that major achievements have been made in transforming the economy and that recovery is on the horizon if his fellow Armenians resist taking the advances for granted. At least two-thirds of the economy is in private hands, and agricultural output has increased under a land reform program begun five years ago.

Homes and shops glow with light round-the-clock now, in sharp contrast with the severe energy shortages that persisted until a year ago and plunged even this city of 1 million into darkness.

Streets flanked by drab apartment blocks are alive with kiosks, cafes and strollers, and the dress and demeanor of Yerevan residents are visibly more upbeat than in the allegedly more stable Soviet era.

Despite the sharp fall in fortunes among Armenia’s best and brightest, there is less nostalgia here for communism than in Russia and other former Soviet republics.

“Living standards were better then, but we were never allowed to be Armenian. We were Soviets, and we didn’t like that,” says linguistics professor Gayane Hovanisyan, who says he plans to vote for Ter-Petrosyan. “Now we are poorer, but we can be ourselves.”

Communist Party candidate Sergei Badalyan could get as much as 10% of the vote from disillusioned pensioners and state workers, his opponents estimate, but his quest to re-integrate Armenia with Russia and other former Soviet republics is not broadly supported in a nation dependent on a huge diaspora mostly in the West.

Ter-Petrosyan has been campaigning under the banner of “Victory, Stability, Progress,” which his chief advisor says is aimed at reminding voters that there is much they could lose.

“We cannot make the mistake of experimenting at this point,” says Jirair Libaridian, denouncing the opposition’s plans for the economy as inflationary and threats to disband the National Assembly and suspend the constitution as likely to precipitate a new crisis.

A 2-year-old cease-fire has suspended a bitter war with Azerbaijan over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, but even slight shifts in policy could rekindle the fighting, warns the UCLA-educated Libaridian.

In an interview between rallies as the campaign draws to a close, Manukyan acknowledges that there is little difference between his economic program and that of the incumbent but accuses Ter-Petrosyan of fostering corruption.

“The whole country is in the hands of about five clans with connections to the current administration,” the challenger says.

Most of the opposition figures who have banded together behind Manukyan accuse Ter-Petrosyan of unfair practices in running for reelection and express fears his supporters may resort to falsification to ensure he wins another five-year term.

International observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have already fanned out to monitor voting at about 10% of the polling places, but they have issued no preliminary judgments about the state of fair play in the election.

The OSCE deemed a July 1995 election to seat the National Assembly free but not entirely fair, because the president’s backers had considerably better resources and because Ter-Petrosyan’s ban on the ultranationalist Armenian Revolutionary Federation ensured that his supporters would win.

“If there is no falsification, there is no doubt the Government of National Accord will win,” says Aram Sarkisyan, the head of the Democratic Party of Armenia, which withdrew his candidacy to bolster Manukyan. “The atmosphere this year is very different. People are inspired by our unity and will support us because they believe we can win.”