This week’s elections in Armenia extended incumbent Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s eight-year rule by another five years without clarifying the powers he will exercise to govern the small South Caucasus country bordered by Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iran, and Georgia.
On Monday, Armenia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) announced that the pro-West Civil Contract Party led by the 51-year-old journalist-turned-statesman Pashinyan garnered 727,160 votes, accounting for 49.8 per cent of the votes cast and just shy of half of them.
The Strong Armenia Alliance led by Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan came second with 340,062 votes, or 23.3 per cent, and the pro-Russian Hayastan Alliance led by former president Robert Kocharyan came third with 145,097 votes or 10 per cent of the votes cast.
“The people of Armenia voted for peace, regional prosperity, and cooperation, and I hope the result will be positively received by Turkey and Azerbaijan,” Pashinyan told journalists at his campaign headquarters after midnight on Sunday when only around 10 per cent of the ballots were counted.
Strong Armenia has dismissed the official vote count as fraudulent, while the Hayastan Alliance intends to contest the results and is coordinating next steps with its opposition allies.
“If they try to brazenly take victory from us, they will face a revolution,” Kocharyan stated at a rally in May. The Prosperous Armenia Party, which garnered 3.996 per cent of the votes and fell short of the four per cent threshold needed for parliamentary representation, has announced its intention to request a recount.
A total of 18 political forces participated in the elections, comprising 16 parties and two alliances, with a voter turnout of 1,476,916 votes, or 59 per cent, according to the CEC, which is led by Vahagn Hovakimyan.
Hovakimyan is a journalist-turned-lawyer who previously served as an assistant to Pashinyan between 2012 and 2015 when the latter was a member of parliament.
If Prosperous Armenia led by businessman Gagik Tsarukyan fails to meet the threshold after the recount, only three political forces will be represented in the new parliament. At the time of writing, the preliminary results indicate that Pashinyan’s party has secured a majority with 64 out of 105 seats, a drop from the 71 seats it held in the previous 2021-2026 parliament.
This figure will allow the party to form a government and pass laws, although it will not be able to introduce a new constitution. Pashinyan needs six more seats to achieve the two-thirds constitutional supermajority required to initiate previously announced constitutional amendments, which include removing references to Artsakh, or Nagorno Karabakh, from the preamble of the country’s Declaration of Independence.
The removal is a precondition set by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev for signing a peace treaty with Armenia. “If the Civil Contract Party does not secure a constitutional majority… there will be war in September,” Pashinyan said during a campaign tour in Yerevan in March.
Strong Armenia has 29 seats in the new parliament, while the Hayastan Alliance, previously the largest opposition group with 29 seats, has only 12, according to the preliminary results. This will result in a combined opposition representation of 41 MPs, compared to the government’s 64.
However, if Prosperous Armenia succeeds in exceeding the four per cent threshold of the votes cast, the three opposition forces would collectively hold 44 seats against the government’s 61. In this scenario, the Civil Contract Party would lose the three-fifths majority required to independently pass laws.
The final composition of the parliament will remain unresolved until the deadline for recount requests has passed and all appeals have been considered.
The 2026 elections in Armenia turned into a fierce conflict between opposing factions: the EU and the US versus Russia; liberals versus nationalists; the government versus the Armenian Apostolic Church; the body versus the spirit; and even Mount Aragats versus Mount Ararat.
The election campaign highlighted the opposition’s fear that if Pashinyan remains in power, he will persist with his policy of potentially conceding three Azeri enclaves and risking the loss of the Syunik Province, which connects Armenia to Iran, to Azerbaijan.
The opposition says that Pashinyan has become a puppet of the Azerbaijani government and has been adhering to directives from Baku. It worries that he may facilitate the settlement of 300,000 Azeris in Armenian territory, an assertion that Pashinyan denied during his election campaign.
Critics of Pashinyan maintain that under his leadership Armenia has lost approximately 200 square km of territory to Azerbaijan, including the controversial TRIPP corridor near the Iranian border that was supposedly established to connect Azerbaijan with its Nakhichevan exclave.
The framework for TRIPP, or the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, was signed at the White House on 8 August by Pashinyan and Aliyev, with US President Donald Trump witnessing the agreement.
Pessimists both in Armenia and the Diaspora worry that by extending his rule Pashinyan may also compromise memory of the 1915 Armenian Genocide to appease Ankara.
His actions could also threaten other aspects of Armenian identity, including the Armenian alphabet, as he attempts to emulate Turkish nationalist leader Kemal Ataturk’s actions in Turkey when he directed that Turkish should be written in the Latin alphabet and not in Arabic.
Pashinyan loyalists dismiss these concerns as fantasies.
The opposition argues that Pashinyan’s policies conceal deeper and more troubling motives. They say that during his rise to power in 2018 in a “velvet” revolution, Pashinyan galvanised the public against corrupt leaders, yet once he was in power, he primarily targeted those who had liberated Artsakh during the 1992-1994 war with Azerbaijan, including Robert Kocharyan, Artsakh’s first president and later Armenia’s second president.
Critics within the opposition allege that Pashinyan has effectively erased Artsakh from the map. They claim that this began in late 2020 with a 44-day war that led to the loss of 80 per cent of the territory of the internationally unrecognised breakaway republic and culminated in the bloodless evacuation of the Artsakh population in autumn 2023.
During an argument in the street during his recent election campaign in Yerevan, Pashinyan asked Artur Osipyan, an Artsakh refugee, “why are you alive?” Osipyan was later arrested on suspicion of hooliganism.
The opposition also says that Pashinyan instructs his supporters to express their animosity towards Russia while professing affection for Europe, all to conceal his true allegiance to Azerbaijan’s interests.
In a live debate broadcast on public television two days before the closure of debates before the election, Narek Karapetyan, the leading candidate of the Strong Armenia Alliance, accused Pashinyan of loyalty to Baku.
“There are 14 pro-Armenian political forces and only one pro-Azerbaijani force, and that one is you,” he said.
Opponents warn that if Pashinyan continues to govern in a way similar to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, playing a West-vs-East game while possibly targeting Iran and engaging Israel amid the expansionist ambitions of Turkey and Azerbaijan, this could result in the collapse of the 108-year-old state.
Pashinyan loyalists dismiss these assertions.
France, Germany, the EU, and Ukraine have congratulated Pashinyan on his electoral victory. “The spirit of the Velvet Revolution you led in 2018 is alive and well,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a message.
“We deeply value our partnership with a democratic Armenia that is drawing ever closer to Europe.”
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova said the parliamentary elections in Armenia were conducted “in an atmosphere of unprecedented pressure on the opposition and interference from the West, particularly the EU.”
Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Moscow is currently awaiting the final results while keeping a close eye on reports related to the elections.
“We will continue our steadfast fight for our homeland until victory,” said Ishkhan Saghatelyan, a member of the Hayastan Alliance.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 June, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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