Drawing inspiration from the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, Armenia’s opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan is being vague about the details of his political agenda not to alienate his newly found lot of supporters. Tomorrow, the Armenian parliament will be voting once again on the candidacy of Nikol Pashinyan, and he is expected to be elected prime minister. Since the course of events in Armenia has defied predictions many times in the last month, no one in Armenia is absolutely sure what will happen tomorrow. If Pashinyan is elected prime minister, it will be the first case in post-Soviet Armenia where someone with no prior connection to the ruling elites has made it to the top. Unlike the leaders of most post-Soviet countries, Pashinyan is not related to either the Soviet elites, or the late 1980s pro-democracy movements, the two main sources of origin of post-Soviet elites. True, at some point Pashinyan was an ally of Armenia’s first president Levon Ter-Petrosyan, but this relationship developed when Ter-Petrosyan was already in opposition, in the 2000s. Born in 1975, Pashinyan was simply too young at the time the Soviet system collapsed. And, while some of his peers chose to advance their … Continue reading Fiery revolutionary or pragmatic politician: what to expect from Nikol Pashinyan