Levon Ter Petrosian Pre-Election Campaign Rally, Liberty Square, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2008

It has to be said that since photographing the campaign of Levon Ter-Petrossian for next month’s 19 February presidential election since 21 September last year — long before the official campaign period actually started at the beginning of this week — I’ve been meaning to concentrate on other candidates, and not least because without doing so this election can’t really be considered free or fair.

Opinion polls and conversations with people on the streets do not create the impression of Ter-Petrossian occupying the position as the main challenger to the prime minister, Serge Sargsyan — for now at least. Instead, for some reason, both the government and opposition media appear to want to create that role for him. Some believe, for example, that Sargsyan stands more of a chance of winning a relatively clean vote (for Armenia) against the former president whose name is synonymous with the corruption, criminality and cronyism of the 1990s.

At any rate, until I find out the details of the other campaigns, especially that of the prime minister and the ARF-D’s Vahan Hovannisyan, I suppose I couldn’t miss it, and especially to compare the number of those in attendance with the number who showed up at Ter-Petrossian’s three Liberty Square rallies held from October-December last year. Then, while the radical opposition and its supporters in the local media claimed anywhere between 20-70,000 were in attendance, independent observers put the number at 12-15,000.

The question was, how many could Ter-Petrosian attract during the actual official pre-election campaign period?

The full post is available on the Armenia Election Monitor 2008.