By Hook or by Crook: Pashinyan Secures Another Five Years in Power — By Harut Sassounian
Regrettably, another fraudulent parliamentary election took place in Armenia on June 7. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s party, Civil Contract, did everything possible, both legally and illegally, to win enough votes to reelect him Prime Minister for another five years.
Pashinyan violated many of Armenia’s election laws. He used the extensive resources of the government for his campaign, thus exploiting his position as Prime Minister. He ordered the arrests of hundreds of opposition members by falsely accusing them of election interference. He threatened to arrest the leaders of opposition parties, thereby violating the independence of the courts. He even repeated these threats during his victory speech on election day.
A year ago, Pashinyan ordered the arrest of prominent businessman Samvel Karapetyan, who, after being wrongly jailed for several months, is now under house arrest. Pashinyan thus deprived his main opposition challenger of the opportunity to campaign in the parliamentary elections.
The Prime Minister will probably have the Catholicos of Armenians arrested on trumped-up charges, thus continuing his vindictive attacks on the Armenian Apostolic Church. Under his orders, several high-ranking clergymen have been wrongly jailed for months, although two of them were recently transferred to house arrest.
Pashinyan also deprived tens of thousands of Artsakh Armenians, who have been citizens of Armenia for years, of their right to vote in the parliamentary elections, fearing that they would vote against his party.
When thousands of Armenian citizens living in Moscow decided to travel to Armenia to vote in the parliamentary elections, Pashinyan ordered their interception at Yerevan Airport and at the Georgia-Armenia border under the excuse of requiring them to serve 25 days of military training. This was, in fact, an obvious attempt to prevent Armenian citizens from exercising their right to vote.
After all that, around 50% (a little over 700,000 citizens) reportedly voted for Pashinyan’s party, ignoring his disastrous rule, which resulted in a devastating defeat in the 2020 war, with thousands of soldiers killed and many more wounded. He then allowed Azerbaijan to occupy all of Artsakh in 2023, after announcing in 2019 that “Artsakh is Armenia. Period.”
He ignored the plight of Artsakh Armenian leaders jailed in Baku, did not support the right of return of 120,000Artsakh Armenians to their homeland, and failed in his duty to liberate parts of the territory of the Republic of Armenia from Azeri occupation beginning in 2021 and 2022.
Pashinyan divided Armenia’s population into “blacks” and “whites,” meaning his supporters vs. non-supporters. He falsely blamed all of the country’s problems on former leaders, even though he has been the Prime Minister for eight years. He divided the Artsakhtsis and Hayastantsis and antagonized Diaspora Armenians.
His misdeeds continue. Since the 2020 war, he made every concession President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan has requested. He agreed to change Armenia’s constitution and is considering turning over the four former Azeri enclaves in Armenia to Azerbaijan.
The smaller opposition parties that did not have a realistic chance of surpassing the minimum required threshold of 4% should not have participated in the elections because 50% of their votes are going to be reallocated to Pashinyan’s party under Armenia’s eccentric election laws. The participation of sixteen political parties and two coalitions in the election is far too many for a small country like Armenia.
When only a fraction of the votes had been counted, Pashinyan prematurely announced on June 7 that he won the election, thereby pressuring the Central Election Commission to declare his party the winner. This constituted blatant interference in the electoral process.
Pashinyan managed to fool most Armenian voters by promising them a nonexistent peace. Aliyev is in no hurry to sign the peace treaty, since he expects to extract more concessions from Pashinyan. Even the White House meeting with Trump, Aliyev and Pashinyan on August 8 did not succeed in pressuring Azerbaijan’s leader to sign the treaty.
However, not everything is lost. Armenians have a second chance to rid themselves of Pashinyan. In the coming months, when he asks Armenians to approve or reject his — or more accurately, Aliyev’s — version of Armenia’s new constitution in a referendum, an all-out effort should be made to reject it, even though Pashinyan will do everything possible to secure its approval.
Since Aliyev has made the signing of the peace treaty conditional on the adoption of the new constitution, Pashinyan will be politically devastated if he fails to gain its approval. Even if he refuses to resign at that point, he will become the laughing stock of the Armenian nation, and his grand designs to accommodate Azerbaijan’s and Turkey’s demands will evaporate.
Finally, for those who constantly tell those of us who are critical of Pashinyan that Armenian voters have spoken and we have no right to intervene in Armenia’s domestic affairs, here are my answers:
Pashinyan’s supporters should be more alarmed by the actions of foreign leaders, including those of the United States, the European Union, and Russia, who interfered in Armenia’s elections.
