Election of the Weekend II: Armenia

Armenia will elect a new National Assembly on Sunday. The minimum 101 seat body is elected by national party list PR (5% threshold for parties, 7% for coalitions), with a bunch of weird rules after the fact. First, if a party receives a majority of total votes, but less than 54% of seats, they will get additional seats to get them to 54%. Second, if the winning party receives over two thirds of the seats, other electorally viable parties will be granted additional seats, as necessary to bring the winning party down to no more than two thirds of the seats. A final fascinating rule: if a government isn’t formed within six days of the final results being released, a run-off between the top two parties will be triggered, effectively guaranteeing one of these parties a 54% majority.

The last few years have been rough in Armenia, as the conflict with Azerbaijan took a turn against them. The defeat and subsequent ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh created over one hundred thousand refugees, virtually all of them found their way to Armenia in 2023, creating a 3-4% population spike essentially overnight. Those of them who had or have rapidly obtained Armenian citizenship (apparently a non-trivial number, although few are willing to venture precise estimates) are an important voting bloc in this election, and one that is almost certainly even more critical of PM Nikol Pashinyan’s handling of that crisis, and even more skeptical of his efforts to form a lasting peace with Azerbaijan and Turkey, than the median vote, complicating his re-election efforts.

Pashinyan leads Civic Contract, a populist/nationalist movement (with some liberal tendencies and pro-Europe sympathies) that played a key role in the Armenia’s 2018 Velvet Revolution, which collapsed the one-party dominant rule of the highly corrupt and kleptocratic Armenian Republican Party, and has been the ruling party since, winning 71 seats in the 2021 election. The military losses to Azerbaijan have pushed both Mr. Pashinyan and much of the public toward a more anti-Russia, pro-Europe position. They view Russian assistance and arms sales to the Azeris as acts of betrayal by their purported allies, pushing them to look for closer relations with Europe and the West. One poll tracked the percentage of Armenians who consider Russia the country’s “main friend” in the world, which dropped from 57% in 2019 to 14% in 2024. A lasting, stable peace agreement with Azerbaijan and Turkey, a step that would make greater integration and closer relations with Europe more practical. (Their borders with both countries are closed, leaving them isolated; the other countries they share a border with are Iran and Georgia, a Russian client state.) His efforts to reach such agreements have been highly controversial, and he’s been confronted and embarrassed on the campaign trail by politically engaged Nagorno-Karabakh refugees, demanding to know how he can make peace with the brutal, unrepentant regime that destroyed their homeland.

Geopolitical significance has attracted the attention of great powers. Putin is furious about Pashinyan’s Western turn, and has unleashed his disinformation machine in the service of Pashinyan’s primary opponent, Samvel Karapetyan. Karapetyan is a billionaire with Russian citizenship, who made most of his fortune in Russia and has close ties to the Kremlin. He is campaigning entirely from his mansion, where he is under house arrest as pre-trial detention for an array of financial crimes. Indeed, he is not even on the ballot and is currently constitutionally ineligible to serve, as Armenia bans dual citizens from Parliament and he holds both Russian and Cypriot passports. (His party, Strong Armenia, pledges to quickly change the constitution to get him into power, should they win.) Many quite reasonably fear an electoral victory for Karapetyan and Strong Armenia would on the Georgian “Russian client state” trajectory. In an interesting twist, this election reveals a Putin/Trump split, as Mr. Pashinyan has Donald Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement in a series of Truth Social posts. JD Vance and Marco Rubio have both recently made visits to Yerevan, where American investment in new infrastructure connecting Armenia and Azerbaijan was discussed. Because of the modest role in brokering the provisional peace agreement played by the US, Trump put his name on it, so it’s the “Trump Route for Peace and Prosperity” that Pashinyan is promoting on the campaign trail. His opponents argue, of course, that he’s now simply a puppet of Azeri and Turkish interests.

Polling suggests Civic Contract and Pashinyan with a substantial but somewhat soft lead, and many undecided. So a Putin/Strong Armenia victory here isn’t likely, but is hard to confidently rule out under current conditions.