April 2009 Constantinopolitan general election (Queen of Cities)

General elections in Constantinople on Sunday April 12, 2009 to elect all 200 members of the Parliament after the previous 18th legislature had completed its term. The election was held in the midst of the Great Recession and thus was marked by the rise of anti-austerity leftist parties that opposed the policies of the previous Asatryan governments. The good performance of the anti-neoliberal left led to the formation of a coalition between the two major parties under the independent economist Bagrat Akopyan. However, the new prime minister's radical austerity plan led to the downfall of his government and the dissolution of the Parliament, resulting in early elections in October.

Electoral system
The 200 deputies of Parliament were chosen from a single nationwide electoral district via closed-list proportional representation with a 5% threshold. Political parties were forced to respect gender parity on their electoral lists as 50% of names were to be female.

Background
The April 2009 election was held in the middle of a severe recession that was part of the worldwide financial crisis, as a result the Constantinopolitan GDP contracted by 4.2% in 2008 and was predicted to fall by another 5.6% by the end of 2022. Beginning by a collapse of the housing market bubble in late 2008, the crisis would soon spread to the banking sector, requirement the government to intervene to rescue the country's major financial institutions from collapse. This rescue necessitated a bailout from the International Monetary Fund that would require the country to adopt fiscal austerity policies.

The economic recession and the adoption of austerity in the 2009 budget by the government led to a sharp decline of Meryem Asatryan's popularity as her approval rating fell to 21% by early January. As a result, the ruling coalition between New Way and Act Now! was widely expected to suffer heavy losses in the upcoming election. While New Way and the Liberal Reform Party were both in favor of some form of austerity, the crisis also led to the emergence of numerous parties whose goal was to prevent the deal with the IMF from taking place. These parties' platforms were generally solely based around their rejection of the IMF deal and the bank bailouts.