Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan promised Tuesday to make the country secure and stable after cruising to victory in an election that international vote monitors said lacked real competition.
But Sargsyan, 58, faces a challenge in his second five-year term to prevent tensions increasing with Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh that could lead to a new war in the South Caucasus, where pipelines carry Caspian oil and gas to Europe.
Preliminary results showed Sargsyan won 58.6 percent of the votes cast in Monday's election, enough to avoid a second-round run-off. His closest rival, U.S.-born former Foreign Minister Raffi Hovannisian, trailed on nearly 37 percent.
International observers said the election was an improvement on last year's, in which 10 people were killed. But "the limited field of candidates meant that the election was not genuinely competitive," representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said in a statement.
Read more: Armenian President Promises Security | News | The Moscow Times
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