Since Armenia’s June parliamentary elections, a noticeable pattern has emerged: people with opposition views or ties to opposition figures appear to be increasingly unwelcome in state institutions.
Over the past two months, at least five public sector employees — including civil servants, doctors, and university lecturers — have lost their jobs after publicly criticizing the government or being linked to opposition figures. While authorities have rejected allegations of political retaliation, the cases collectively paint a troubling picture.
One of the most recent and prominent cases is that of doctor Arpine Soghoyan, who confronted Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan over Nagorno-Karabakh during the election campaign. The exchange went viral, and Pashinyan later claimed it, along with other similar exchanges, had been part of a coordinated opposition effort to provoke him.
Soon afterwards, reports emerged that Soghoyan had been asked to resign. At the time, Yerevan Mayor Tigran Avinyan insisted no one would lose their job because of their political views. Yet roughly two months later, Soghoyan was dismissed as part of what officials described as staff layoffs.
A similar explanation was given in the case of Lilit Ghazaryan, deputy director of the state-run Drug Expertise Centre and sister of opposition politician Edgar Ghazaryan, a parliamentary candidate for the Strong Armenia Alliance. After reportedly refusing to resign, one of the centre’s two deputy director positions was abolished, effectively costing her the job she had held for more than three decades.
The first high-profile dismissal after the elections involved Gohar Vardanyan, a local official in the border village of Kirants, which was demarcated in 2024. She said she was pressured to resign after taking to Facebook to dispute claims that Civil Contract’s strong electoral performance in the village reflected genuine local support.
Questions have also been raised at Yerevan State University, where several lecturers with opposition views were not offered new contracts after their existing ones expired.
Taken together, these cases suggest a pattern that sits uneasily with Pashinyan’s efforts to present democratic reforms and the protection of civil liberties as the defining achievements of his government since the 2018 Velvet Revolution. For many of those who brought him to power, those promises matter as much as any other pressing issue.
No matter what someone is earning — whether as little as a university lecturer in Armenia’s sad and common reality or as the primary breadwinner for their families — political disagreement should never be grounds for depriving people of their jobs.
In the long run, abandoning the values that helped bring Pashinyan to power could erode public trust and blur the distinction between his leadership and the political system he once fought against.
