Daniel Ioannisyan: 'The CPP is Trying to Take Community Power Through Pressure'

Daniel Ioannisyan, the founder of the 'Ingaged Citizens' NGO, wrote on his Facebook page:

“Without delving into legal discussions on all kinds of dirty tactics, we must state that in Vardenis, the opposition received more votes in financial terms than the CPP. The opposition has 14 members in the council while the CPP has 13. It is clear that the community leader should be from the opposition. This reflects the will of the Vardenis citizens as expressed in the elections.

However, the CPP is not accepting this reality. Initially, they tried to disrupt the community leader's election session through the police, then, without any basis, went to the administrative court to challenge the legitimacy of the elected community leader. Today, they are using the police to prevent the council members elected by the people from entering the community administration building.

A question may arise: why is the CPP resorting to all these time-consuming tactics if they only hold 13 out of 27 seats in the community council? I assume that during this period, they are trying to leverage the influence of power holders and/or sway at least one member of the council to their side and obtain a majority to seize community power.

For now, it is clear that the CPP, by abusing administrative leverage, is preventing the forces that gathered the majority of the votes of the Vardenis citizens from forming the community authority.”