Serge Sargsyan Pre-Election Campaign Rally, Massiv, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2008

Today marked a welcome change — a morning call from E-Channel’s Gegham Vardanian alerting me to a pre-election campaign rally by the prime minister and presidential favorite, Serge Sargsyan, in the Massiv district of Yerevan. As this blog has almost entirely focused on the campaign by the former president, Levon Ter-Petrossian, the opportunity to photograph and observe some of the other candidates in action was very much welcomed despite the weather.

It should also be pointed out that this blog and E-Channel have agreed to voluntarily cooperate with the sharing of information and materials for the 19 February presidential election in Armenia. With the media becoming more politicized than it’s ever been in Armenia, finding more neutral sources of news and triangulating it with eye witness accounts as well as other reports from a variety of sources has become the only way to get a clear picture of the situation these days.

Other media outlets were also in attendance. In amongst the dozen TV cameras and other journalists covering the event, RFE/RL was one of them although it’s worth pointing out that A1 Plus put the number of those in attendance at “Over a thousand” while E-Channel put it at “1,000.”

Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian pledged to turn Armenia into a “brilliant country” and responded to intensifying verbal attacks from former President Levon Ter-Petrosian as he took his election campaign to Yerevan on Friday.

Sarkisian spent a large part of his speech at a campaign rally in the city’s northern Nor Nork suburb condemning the “malicious” discourse of his most bitter opposition challenger.

“But I am asking you not to succumb to provocations, not to respond to malice with malice because our aim is not just to garner many votes,” he told several hundred people who gathered in front of a local church. “Our aim is to move Armenia forward after the elections … It is never possible to do good things with malice.”

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