By Margarita Antidze

YEREVAN, Feb 17 (Reuters) - Armenian Prime Minister Serzh Sarksyan appeared confident of victory in a Feb. 19 presidential election, telling tens of thousands of his supporters on Sunday his rivals were unable to deliver on their campaign pledges.

The 53-year-old premier is supported by President Robert Kocharyan. Both are credited with ensuring fast economic growth and raising living standards in the tiny Caucasus nation, which has tense relations with neighbouring Turkey and Azerbaijan.

Opinion polls give Sarksyan more than 50 percent of voter support, and he has said he hopes to win outright in Tuesday's first round of the election.

"We are the only force able to make good on the promises given during the election campaign," Sarksyan told a rally of around 40,000 of his supporters in Freedom Square in the centre of Armenia's capital Yerevan.

"The opposition cannot do the same. You can't rely upon these people," he said to the enthusiastic crowd of supporters, many waving Armenia's blue-orange-red tricolor flags.

Chanting "Victory!", the rally later marched to a cathedral along a central avenue.

Sarksyan's two rivals -- former speaker of parliament Artur Baghdasaryan and previous President Levon Ter-Petrosyan who was forced to resign in 1998 -- have failed to forge a last-minute alliance, boosting the premier's chances to win.

Earlier this month Ter-Petrosyan complained to Armenia's Constitutional Court that officials were causing "insurmountable obstacles" for his campaign. He said he was being denied equal access to the television airwaves.

Baghdasaryan's Orinats Yerkir (Country of Law) party was trounced by Sarksyan's Republican party in parliamentary elections last May, seen as a rehearsal for Tuesday's vote.

If he is elected president, Sarksyan will have to deal with the unresolved conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of oil-producing Azerbaijan whose ethnic Armenian population broke away in a 1990s war.

The independence of Serbia's province of Kosovo could strengthen a bid by Armenian-backed Nagorno-Karabakh to be recognised as a state, Sarksyan told Reuters in an interview.

Armenia's relations with Azerbaijan's ally Turkey are fraught, in part because it refuses to recognise as genocide the killings of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman Turkey.

Sarksyan has promised to reduce the proportion of the population living in poverty to 10 percent from today's 25 percent during his five-year term, to bolster economic reforms and to create new jobs. (Writing by Dmitry Solovyov; editing by Andrew Roche)

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