National Assembly Moves to Amend Electoral Code, Introducing Restrictions on Coalition Names

YEREVAN — Armenia’s National Assembly began an extraordinary discussion on April 7 regarding a package of amendments and additions to the Electoral Code. One of the key provisions introduces restrictions on the naming of party alliances.

The opposition has accused the ruling authorities of pushing this amendment in order to prevent the registration of an alliance formed by the parties “Strong Armenia,” “New Era,” and “United Armenians” under the name “Strong Armenia with Samvel Karapetyan.”

The authors of the draft have not ruled out that the amendment could indeed have that effect.

The bill was introduced under an emergency procedure. In addition to changes to the Electoral Code, several other legislative initiatives were also presented.

The legislative initiative was authored by three deputies from the ruling Civil Contract Party faction: Arusyak Julhakyan, Alkhas Ghazaryan, and Artur Hovhannisyan.

They argue that during previous amendments, an important technical drafting error occurred: the word “sentence” was mistakenly replaced in a way that caused an entire “paragraph” to lose legal force. As a result, key restrictions regarding alliance names were unintentionally deleted.

The new draft restores those restrictions and clarifies that the name of a party alliance may not contain:

• personal names,
• the names of state or local self-government bodies,
• names confusingly similar to such institutions,
• grammatical variations of such names,
• insulting or defamatory words and expressions.

According to the draft, the primary objective of these amendments is to correct the technical error, ensure legal certainty, and restore the internal consistency and harmony of the Electoral Code’s regulatory framework.