YEREVAN, June 21. /TASS/. The I Have Honor election bloc of Armenia’s former President Serzh Sargsyan and former chief of the National Security Service Artur Vanetsyan said on Monday it doesn’t recognize the results of Sunday’s early parliamentary elections, saying these elections were a legitimization of the deplorable outcome of combat operations in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone in the autumn of 2020.

"We state that we don’t recognize these results as a legitimization of the territorial and human losses in the latest Artsakh (the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh republic — TASS) war, as fixing Armenia’s status as a bargaining chip in geopolitical trade," the bloc said in a statement.

"The elections have not turned into a political process, they have not turned into a roadmap of taking Armenian out of the abyss," it stressed. "Instead, law enforcement agencies unleashed repressions against the opposition, ungrounded searches of activists’ apartments, their arrests, telephone tapping. So, we see numerous blatant facts of hampering the opposition’s work on the voting day and cases of direct pressure on voters from the authorities with the use of administrative tools," the statement said.

Armenia held early parliamentary elections on Sunday. The voter turnout was 49.4%. According to the Central Election Commission, acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party won 53.92% of the vote. Kocharyan’s Armenia bloc scored 21.04% of votes and the I Have Honor bloc led by another former President Serzh Sargsyan won 5.23% of votes, but failed to surpass the 7% threshold set for election blocs. Nevertheless, I have Honor will have seats in the parliament, since under the current legislation, at least three political forces are to be represented in the parliament.