Vahan Hovannisian Pre-Election Campaign Youth Meeting, Moscow Cinema, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2008

This weekend saw the last two days of campaigning for Tuesday’s presidential election in Armenia and it was always going to be busy. Yesterday, former president Levon Ter-Petrossian rallied his people in Liberty Square before the prime minister held his this afternoon. Elsewhere, another candidate, Tigran Karapetian, rallied a few hundred at the Matenadaran while Artur Baghdasarian had to settle for Armenia’s second largest city of Gyumri given that he couldn’t do so yesterday and the Yerevan municipality didn’t grant him permission to hold a rally in the center of the capital today.

Becoming tired of all these rallies which usually don’t amount to much more than mutual mudslinging and playing the numbers game, it was nice to start the day with a rally by a few hundred youth from the Armenian Revolutionary Federation — Dashnaktsutyun (ARF-D) affiliated Nikol Aghbalian Student Union. Marching in red jackets to recorded ARF songs blaring from a loudspeaker attached to an accompanying van, the young Dashnaks walked from Komitas to the Moscow Cinema in the city center, passing out campaign leaflets for the ARF-D candidate, Vahan Hovannisian.

More impressively, they did it without malice, without hate. They campaigned in high spirits, in song, and with smiles on their faces — something that is not common here, but very welcomed to say the least. Indeed, the action was just another positive development introduced into Armenia by the party which has already set a precedent for mature campaigning and the use of Western style pre-election tactics. Whether it will help them at the polls is another matter, of course, but it makes a change from the deeply depressing and boring mass rallies favored by most of the other candidates.