Ahead of EU summit and election, Brussels is backing the wrong horse in Armenia
The European Union has built its identity around the export of democratic norms. Rule-of-law conditionality, election monitoring, civil society support are the tools Brussels deploys to signal virtue.
In Armenia, six weeks before the country’s most consequential parliamentary elections in a generation, the EU is deploying all of those tools and aiming every one of them at the wrong target.
The facts are not in dispute.
The EU’s Hybrid Rapid Response Team deployed in Armenia is not an independent monitoring body. Its formal mandate is to advise the office of prime minister Nikol Pashinyan.
Separately, a €12m EU package to “counter disinformation” ahead of the 7 June elections channels funds through institutions directly under the government’s influence.
Armenia’s opposition and many independent observers have characterized this support as green light for election manipulation by conferring European legitimacy on a government that has done nothing to earn it.
Under an emergency legislative procedure permitting adoption within 24 hours — a timeline that makes public deliberation impossible — the ruling Civil Contract party pushed through sweeping Electoral Code amendments, including granting authorities broad new powers to disqualify election observer organizations.
Brussels issued no public response.
Samvel Karapetyan, Armenia’s leading opposition figure, an Armenian-Russian businessman, and a principal financial backer of the Armenian Apostolic Church, remains under house arrest on charges widely described in Armenia as fabricated.
The EU, which conditions candidate country negotiations on judicial independence, has not linked either case to its programming in Armenia.
A Brussels success story?
Brussels would counter that Armenia is a success story, a country that signed a Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement with the EU and expressed aspirations toward European integration.
But Pashinyan’s own words tell a different story.
Presenting his party’s official election program, he declared that “it is difficult to overestimate the importance of our relations with Russia” and vowed he “will not allow any attempts to create problems in Armenia–Russia relations.”
He has gone further still: those who seek to “undermine Armenian–Russian friendship and brotherhood,” he announced, “are simply foreign agents”, using the precise term the Kremlin uses to silence dissidents and suppress opposition.
His European overtures are a negotiating card — played to extract resources and legitimacy while he remains firmly tethered to Moscow and Ankara.
The EU is not witnessing a geopolitical pivot. It is being played.
This should surprise no one who has followed the record closely. As this author documented in a 2024 ECIPE Policy Brief, there is evidence that suggests Pashinyan could have met with Sergey Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, in Moscow as far back as 2015, three years before his celebrated “Velvet Revolution.”
Once in power, he sent Armenian troops to serve alongside Russian forces in Syria, something his predecessors refused to do, chaired the Eurasian Union Summit in Moscow as recently as May 2024, and has visited Putin several dozen times since coming to power in 2018.
The EU is not financing a democratic partner. It is subsidising a Russian asset.
The EU has been aware of these warning signs and has chosen to ignore them. As the same report published by ECIPE documented, Western officials with direct knowledge of Armenia “ignored all the signs of foul play that were visible” from the outset.
The more structural explanation, however, is energy. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Europe to diversify its gas imports, Brussels turned to Baku.
EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen travelled to Azerbaijan in July 2022 and praised it as a “reliable partner,” signing a deal to double gas imports from a regime Freedom House classifies as “Not Free.”
Pashinyan’s Armenia sits squarely between Brussels and Baku. Keeping him in power keeps Aliyev’s gas flowing and the South Caucasus corridor open.
Europe’s failure in Armenia is not simply negligence. It is a transaction.
The stakes are about to become even more concrete.
Three-steps at summit
The first-ever EU–Armenia summit — on Monday (4 May) and Tuesday in Yerevan, with both European Council president António Costa and von der Leyen making the trip — risks compounding every mistake described above.
EU leaders travelling to Yerevan while Pashinyan jails opponents, persecutes the church, and rewrites electoral rules in real time would hand him precisely the Western legitimacy stamp his pre-election narrative requires.
EU leaders would do well to recall how US vice-president JD Vance’s embrace of Viktor Orbán backfired — and resist the temptation to make the same mistake in Yerevan.
Three course corrections are available before 7 June.
First, the EU should reorient its monitoring resources away from the prime minister’s office and toward genuinely independent civil society organizations and opposition-linked observer groups.
Second, Brussels should issue a clear public statement that last-minute changes to the electoral code designed to give the ruling party expanded powers, is incompatible with the democratic standards Armenia has committed to uphold.
Third, the EU should make explicit what its partnership conditionality has always implied: that imprisoning political opponents to prevent their participation in an election, and directing state resources against the country’s principal religious institution, are not behaviors compatible with European integration.
The EU helped Armenia open a door toward Europe. It would be a particular kind of tragedy if European funding and institutional cover were what allowed Pashinyan to slam it shut.
