Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan will secure a new five-year term in an election on Monday, an exit poll showed, Reuters writes.
The agency reminds that Sargsyan, 58, has vowed to sustain economic recovery in his landlocked South Caucasus country and said before the vote he would ensure stability after years of war and upheaval.
Bloomberg writes that “while the president failed to alleviate poverty that afflicts a third of Armenia’s three million people, the $10 billion economy is forecast to grow more than 4 percent in 2013” and adds that “the GDP will jump 6.2 percent this year after rising 7.2 percent in 2011, the government predicts.”
Reuters quotes Artak Avetsyan, 31, a teacher who came to cast his ballot for the incumbent, as saying: “Sargsyan promotes the improvement of an educated society, which is a guarantee of Armenia’s future.”
“Exit polls from Armenia’s election suggest that incumbent President Serzh Sargsyan has won another five-year term. He has promised stability for the troubled region where pipelines carry Caspian oil and gas to Europe,” Deutsche Welle writes.
Referring to the Armenian presidential elections, the BBC reminds that “the country has found it difficult to escape from poverty, partly because of a trade blockade imposed by neighboring Turkey and Azerbaijan since the 1990s war over Nagorno-Karabakh.”
