Armenia Election to Gauge Pashinyan's Peace Push After War Loss
IJEVAN, Armenia, June 4 (Reuters) — When Anna Yegoyan first moved from the Armenian capital to this northern mountain town, she had to navigate bumpy, potholed roads to get there. Now, years later, she points to freshly paved streets and highways as evidence of progress under Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, a native of the area, and says she will back him in Sunday’s parliamentary election.
“Armenia has become a proper country,” said the 40-year-old, who attended a Pashinyan rally in the town of about 20,000 residents. “Our place in the world is more recognisable.”
The vote on June 7 is a barometer of Pashinyan’s bid to forge lasting peace with longtime foe Azerbaijan, deepen ties with the West and steer the landlocked nation of 3 million away from its traditional patron, Russia. He has pitched Armenia as a potential “crossroads of peace” that could reopen borders with both Azerbaijan and Turkey, closed for decades.
Opinion polls put Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party at about 30 percent support, well ahead of his main challenger, Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, who advocates for closer Moscow ties and trails at between 6 and 11 percent.
The shift away from Russia is a delicate balancing act. Armenia sends roughly a third of its exports to Russia and depends heavily on Moscow for energy. In recent weeks, Russia — which maintains a large military base in the country — has tightened the screws, restricting a range of Armenian exports and threatening to cut off cheap gas and oil supplies. The government in Yerevan has largely downplayed the risks, but polls now show a third of Armenians regard Russia as a threat, behind only Azerbaijan and Turkey.
Progress Toward a Peace Deal
Pashinyan has won a strong endorsement from U.S. President Donald Trump, who helped broker a meeting between him and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and is pushing a transit corridor across southern Armenia as part of a potential peace agreement. Europe is also watching closely. “Anxious for a foothold in a region sandwiched between Russia and Iran, it has a clear interest in Armenia being more sovereign, more autonomous and more able to trade westwards,” said Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe.
Sunday’s election is the first since Armenia’s 2023 military defeat, when Azerbaijan retook the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, prompting the exodus of around 100,000 ethnic Armenians. Pashinyan has touted progress toward peace and the re-opening of the frontier with Turkey, sealed since 1993. But no final deal with Baku has been signed, and critics accuse him of giving away too much.
“Although there are still some outstanding issues — like Armenian territory being occupied and Armenian prisoners of war being held in Baku — the ruling party says peace has arrived,” said Tigran Grigoryan, director of the Regional Centre for Democracy and Security think tank in Yerevan. He argued that such messaging “diverts the responsibility for all the security failures we’ve had throughout the years.”
If Pashinyan fails to secure a two-thirds parliamentary majority, it would be difficult for him to honor a pledge to Azerbaijan to hold a referendum on changing Armenia’s constitution, potentially stalling peace efforts. He also faces accusations of authoritarianism from opposition parties and international rights groups. Dozens of opponents have been detained, including allies of Karapetyan, who is under house arrest on charges of calling to usurp power. Karapetyan and another contender, former President Robert Kocharyan, want to maintain friendly relations with Russia and warn that Pashinyan is getting too close to Azerbaijan.
Karabakh Exodus Leaves Scars
In the 2021 election, Pashinyan drew strong support from voters far from the centers of power, while underperforming in the wealthier capital. “Pashinyan is able to talk the language of the common people, the language people understand,” said Mikayel Zolyan, a political analyst and former lawmaker. Since coming to power in the 2018 Velvet Revolution, he has overseen a doubling of GDP per capita, opened hundreds of kindergartens and paved thousands of kilometres of roads.
But for Anahit Grigoryan, who fled Nagorno-Karabakh with her young son after her husband was killed in an explosion at a military fuel depot during the one-day war in 2023, that progress means little. Now 26, she lives with four generations of her family in a village outside Yerevan, surviving on a small refugee allowance and selling cakes made with eggs from her backyard chickens. As a former Karabakh resident, she would need Armenian citizenship documents to vote — but says she is not interested.
“I feel like my voice will not be heard,” said the mother of four-year-old Karen. “Justice, for me, is not realistic. It’s very hard for me to look my mother, my grandmother and other women who lost their kids in the eyes.”
(Reporting by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Ros Russell)