According to official but still preliminary results, Civil Contract won 49.81 percent of the vote, enough to secure an absolute majority in parliament with 61 seats.
Pashinyan has already been congratulated on his victory by the leaders of Kazakhstan, France, Estonia and Latvia, as well as by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Pashinyan said that Civil Contract would form the new government on its own, without entering into coalitions. He has framed his victory as the Armenian people’s choice of peace over war, while referring to the pro-Russian opposition as a “three-headed party of war.”
The Armenian prime minister announced the imminent opening of the border with Turkey and said it was necessary to launch the so-called Trump Route transit corridor from Azerbaijan through Armenian territory as soon as possible. At the same time, Pashinyan stressed that Armenia would remain a member of the Eurasian Economic Union, did not seek a rupture with Russia, but had chosen a course toward European integration.
The current distribution of seats in parliament will not allow Pashinyan to push through constitutional amendments on his own — amendments that are necessary for the normalization of relations with Azerbaijan. One way or another, this means Pashinyan will remain bound by the need to maintain contact with the Kremlin and with Russia’s soft power networks inside Armenia.
Judging by the outcome, the Kremlin appears to have lost these elections. But this result had been foreseeable.
Russia did not have a unified strategy in this campaign. Some pro-Kremlin lobbyists promoted friendly oligarchs; others relied on the long-standing personal relationship between Vladimir Putin and Robert Kocharyan; still others looked for compromise. The Kremlin, rather reluctantly, played along with the election, allowing different interested groups to use their own prepared scenarios.
During the Armenian campaign, the subjective and egalitarian approaches of various Kremlin teams produced only limited results. The deeper problem, however, is that Armenian voters are no longer living either through a phase of “Greater Armenia” or through a phase of brotherly friendship with Russia. Armenia is now dealing with pragmatic problems caused by the literal collapse of the entire post-Soviet paradigm. The country is leaving the post-Soviet era and entering a new historical period.
Surprisingly, not many people in the Kremlin seem to understand this.
The Presidential Administration’s Directorate for Strategic Partnership and Cooperation will now have to work with this reality. The struggle over constitutional changes in Armenia will allow the Kremlin to retain some influence, but it will be important not to waste room for maneuver — and not to exchange it for another destructive conflict between the two countries. The sooner the Kremlin forgets the idea of forcing Armenia into the Union State and manages to build relations on an equal footing, the more stable those relations will be in the future.
In this election, the Armenian prime minister took a highly rational position: he never allowed himself to be drawn into a verbal confrontation with the Kremlin and instead shifted the entire debate back inside Armenia. This caution was a successful tactical move by Pashinyan’s team.
Sources believe that the Kremlin should no longer rely solely on Samvel Karapetyan. In relations with Armenia, Moscow needs to focus on investment, on Russia’s own interests in maintaining a presence in the South Caucasus, and on Turkey’s role in the region.
Armenian society is well aware of the benefits of cooperation with Russia. For example, the idea of building a nuclear power plant looks highly attractive. A multi-vector foreign policy is supported by most Armenian citizens, and Pashinyan is now the political figure expressing precisely this position.
According to an Armenian political analyst, Pashinyan captured these public moods well and tried during his campaign to combine the seemingly incompatible: he spoke about support from the European Union while also insisting that Armenia had no intention of leaving the Eurasian Economic Union.
Pashinyan will now focus on overcoming the consequences of the Karabakh war and on reshaping the political landscape, with the aim of pushing the Karabakh clan out of Armenian politics.
One of his most important tasks will be to build Armenia’s own energy infrastructure, allowing the country to reduce its dependence on Russian hydrocarbons. This will be a long road, with many obstacles along the way. Few believe that Armenia will move rapidly toward the European Union; rather, Armenian elites are likely using this factor skillfully in their own political game. But the country needs diversified investment. Only that will allow Armenia to develop and maintain a sustainable existence.
