The Yerevan City Council will convene an emergency session on Wednesday to give a vote of no confidence to Yerevan Mayor Hayk Marutyan, who represents the My Step faction affiliated with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, in a move that is supported by Pashinyan.
The removal of mayor, orchestrated by his own political alliance, is the latest move by Pashinyan and his allies to close ranks. The My Step faction, which is populated by members of the prime minister’s Civil Contract party, has not provided a reason for this abrupt move, which was set in motion on Tuesday.
Pashinyan, having just returned from a trip to Brussels where he held two meetings with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, convened a meeting of the My Step alliance on Thursday.
“There is a political crisis. There are differences in political guidelines; it is already known that it has been a year since Hayk Marutyan left the ‘Civil Contract’ party. We have been trying to find lines of cooperation for nearly a year, but unfortunately we have not succeeded,” a high-ranking My Step faction member in the city council Armen Kotolyan said following Thursday’s meeting.
Last December Marutyan left Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party and in June, during the parliamentary elections, he distanced himself from the prime minister and his circle.
“Hayk Marutyan has not fulfilled and does not fulfill with sufficient efficiency the obligations the ‘My Step’ bloc has undertaken before the citizens of Yerevan enshrined in the pre-election program,” the group said in an announcement Thursday, accusing the mayor of failing to curb “systemic corruption” from the city government.
The My Step alliance has nominate another Civil Contract member, Hrachya Sargsyan, as its candidate for mayor.
