Pashinyan agrees with Prosperous Armenia on holding snap parliamentary election in Dec
YEREVAN. Oct 8 (Interfax) - Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Prosperous Armenia party chairman Gagik Tsarukyan, a leading Armenian entrepreneur, have signed a memorandum on snap parliamentary election.
"Tsarukyan and I have just signed the memorandum on the early parliamentary election in December of 2018," Pashinyan wrote on Facebook.
"In the event of the prime minister's resignation, to organize an early election and the parliament's dissolution, the Tsarykyan parliamentary faction, as a force assisting the revolution, will undertake to refrain from nominating its candidate for the post of Prime Minister or backing any other candidate. The members of the faction will not participate in an initiative of nominating a candidate for Prime Minister on the part of one-third of the parliament," the published document reads.
When speaking in the parliament last Wednesday, Pashinyan reiterated that an early parliamentary election should be held in December.
The leaders of the Armenian parliamentary factions of the Republican Party, Prosperous Armenia and Dashnaktsutyun spoke earlier against holding an election in December. They said that an election could be scheduled for May of 2019 and claimed that they would agree to refrain from nominating their own candidates for the head of government.
Currently, there are totally four factions in the Armenian parliament that has 105 seats. The Republican Party's Opposition Faction has 50 seats. The Tsarukyan faction has 31 mandates. The Dashnaktsutyun faction consists of seven members, and the Elk faction has nine. Eight members of parliament are not part of any faction, as they left the Republican Party's faction after the transition of power in Armenia this year.