As Armenia edges closer to the pivotal parliamentary elections set for June this year, the rhetoric on all sides has become more pointed, with all sides using increasingly harsh language to describe their opponents. There is a growing sense, explicitly promoted by both Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and the primary opposition forces, that this is an existential election. As always, security and the long-running conflict with Azerbaijan, as well as shifting choices about relations with the West or Russia, remain the defining issues.
But roughly speaking — very roughly — Pashinyan is focused on the future, while the opposition is largely consumed by demonising Pashinyan for things that have happened in the past (of course, the recent past).
Armenia’s defeat in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 and the surrender of Nagorno-Karabakh after Azerbaijan’s lightning offensive in 2023, as well as the ongoing peace process, loom large over the election. Pashinyan, who has been in power since 2018, is blamed for both the defeats and the alleged concessions Armenia has made to Azerbaijan as part of the negotiations.
In turn, he has taken to calling the opposition ‘war parties’, saying that their election could shatter the delicate peace that has largely been established over the past year and return Armenia to the state of never-ending frozen (or not-so-frozen) conflict that defined the decades since independence.
The main opposition figures, former President Robert Kocharyan, Russian-Armenian tycoon Samvel Karapetyan, and oligarch Gagik Tsarukyan are all problematic for their own separate reasons, which I do not think is entirely necessary to go into here (perhaps, lets consider if someone who wants to build the largest Jesus statue in the world would be an appropriate prime minister). The fact is, the past is the past, and many of the factors that lead to those defeats were a long time coming and the result of many years of poor planning and overreliance (or wishful thinking) on the prospect of Russian help. Nevermind that Kocharyan himself is partially responsible for the security dilemma Armenia found itself in, having been in power for more than 10 years.
In any case, electing any of these three is unlikely to bring Armenia any closer to retaking Nagorno-Karabakh. While there is much to criticise from Armenia’s perspective about the peace process, it is unclear what the opposition would do differently. Returning to a situation in which Russia is once again a reliable security partner, to the extent that Armenia does not need to make concessions, is both a fantasy scenario and one that requires a false reading of history.
His many faults aside, particularly concerning issues of democracy and civil liberties, Pashinyan has rather deftly read the geopolitical room. He has recognised Armenia’s structural weaknesses vis-a-vis Azerbaijan and that ultimately, the Karabakh movement is a lost cause. Any efforts to walk away from the negotiations or reverse the official recognition of Nagorno-Karabakh as being part of Azerbaijan will likely result in more war, which Armenia would likely lose.
Regardless of what one thinks of the Azerbaijani regime, a fragile level of trust has been forged on a personal level between President Ilham Aliyev and Pashinyan, and the election of one of the ‘three-headed war party’, as Pashinyan deemed the main opposition figures, could certainly upend that.
Writing from Georgia, we have seen the ruling Georgian Dream party routinely claim that the so-called ‘global war party’ has sought to pull Georgia into Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. This ridiculous and baseless fearmongering has become a central part of Georgian Dream’s propaganda, to the extent that any reference to a ‘war party’ at all draws derision.
There is certainly much more that can be done from the Armenian side regarding Nagorno-Karabakh, such as efforts to protect heritage sites, secure the release of prisoners held by Azerbaijan, or increasing support for Nagorno-Karabakh refugees to feel at home in Armenia. But these can be done while looking forward to the future, in the context of peace, not in an imaginary scenario when the clock is somehow rolled back to before 2020.
