Armenia's June 2026 parliamentary elections are taking place at an inflection point without modern precedent in the country's post-Soviet history. In light of major strategic geopolitical and domestic shifts, voters will be asked to assess the government’s political record and vision for Armenia’s future. Beyond the immediate electoral outcome, the race will serve as a principal test of Armenia’s democratic path.

To better understand these dynamic critical processes, Dr. Laurence Broers, Associate Fellow at the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House and co-editor-in-chief of Caucasus Survey, offers an in-depth account of the pre-election environment, the complex discourses and electoral calculations at play, and what the ensuing political consequences may mean for Armenia in the years to come.

How would you assess Armenia’s pre-election environment overall, not only from a domestic perspective, but also through the lens of international observers and monitoring missions, especially given the high geopolitical and democratic stakes surrounding this election?

Since the 1990s, Armenian elections have a long history of being intensely contested, both when Armenia featured a more authoritarian hybrid regime and a democratic hybrid regime as it has now. Nevertheless, the environment surrounding this election is exceptionally febrile, due to the amplifying effects of the epochal geopolitical inflection point at which the country finds itself. 

Many of the characteristic malpractices associated with elections in hybrid regimes have been reported, including the use of administrative resources by the incumbent regime, heavy-handed responses to individual protest, pressures on public sector employees and widespread allegations of vote-buying by opposition parties. These features are further heated up by the unprecedented geopoliticization of these elections, with external powers making their preferences unmistakably clear, from the European Union (EU)’s hosting of its European Political Community and first EU-Armenia summits in Yerevan a few days before the campaign started, President Donald Trump’s open endorsement of incumbent Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on social media, to President Vladimir Putin’s call for Russia-oriented parties’ participation and a referendum on Armenia’s Eurasian Union (EAEU) membership. 

The external rivalry dimension is further exacerbated by the algorithmic realities of ever more sophisticated information manipulation campaigns by foreign actors, sowing confusion and saturating the information space with geopolitical narratives, detracting from debates about the socio-economic issues that are pressing for many voters. 

The campaign appears highly asymmetrical. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan enters the race with institutional advantages, international legitimacy, and relatively strong polling numbers. At the same time, the opposition tends to struggle organizationally and remains fragmented and, in some cases, politically constrained. How would you compare the strengths, weaknesses, and strategic narratives of both the ruling camp and the opposition during this campaign?

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan enjoys a trifecta of incumbent, economic and conjunctural advantages. He has enjoyed a dominant media presence due to the succession of high-profile events punctuating this campaign, from the EU summits that preceded it to the military parade of 28 May. Since the last election in 2021, Armenia’s economy has also enjoyed a period of growth, even if some of the positive statistics have been due to re-exports to Russia. Securing trade agreements with other states has been a prominent feature of recent rounds of Armenian diplomacy, driving a narrative of Armenia’s potential as a growing, high-tech and interconnected economy, rather than the blockaded, oligarchic economy of previous decades. This is still more a scenario than a reality, and its fulfillment depends on Armenia’s geopolitical situation.   

Here, Pashinyan is offering a foundational narrative of ‘peace’ after a dismal decade of war with Azerbaijan and military disasters which have left no family in Armenia untouched. This election comes after more than two years since the last military fatalities (in February 2024), and while national security remains a primary concern for many in the electorate, Pashinyan’s peace agenda is the narrative that most obviously offers a resolution to the ‘lack of peace.’ Pashinyan is very much the face of this peace, which does not necessarily bode well for the fuller institutionalization of the agreement negotiated with Azerbaijan in 2025, but makes for a compelling discourse about the choices in this election. 

Pashinyan was also, of course, the face of the Velvet Revolution in 2018, a civic uprising that is nonetheless perceived as a collective good ‘belonging’ to all those who participated. As the South Caucasus and the wider world become ever more authoritarian, the meaning of the Velvet Revolution grows as a foundational distinguishing feature of Armenia’s politics and a shock absorber for Pashinyan’s subsequent demarches. While the implementation of reforms has been uneven, in some areas core to the ethos of the Velvet Revolution, such as anti-corruption measures, progress has been made. 

Consequently, the opposition to Nikol Pashinyan and his Civil Contract party finds itself in the unenviable position of needing to offer a better option than peace to a war-weary electorate. Unsurprisingly, they have struggled to put forward a coherent alternative scenario for Armenia’s future. They have not united around a single candidate and remain fragmented among the more Russia-oriented and more Western-oriented parties, most of which are unlikely to cross the threshold for representation in parliament. In the light of Armenia’s current conjuncture – an unavoidable reckoning with Armenia’s strategic errors and over-extension in Mountainous Karabakh over the past three decades – opposition parties may contend and contest the details of the peace that Pashinyan has negotiated, but there is no obvious alternative narrative which could sustain an effective electoral campaign.   

To what extent has Pashinyan succeeded in transforming his image from a post-revolutionary populist figure into a more institutional and internationally accepted and endorsed leader, particularly amid growing engagement with Europe, high-level summits in Yerevan, and visible support from Western actors such as Macron’s France? How decisive is this growing international legitimacy in the context of the election?

Nikol Pashinyan is a skilled and chameleonic political communicator, skills that have served his political survival well. Yet his communication style is very much directed towards direct communion with the electorate, which drives concerns over the personalization of political legitimacy rather than its diffusion across the various pillars and agencies of the state. He holds an overwhelming dominance of the media sphere, with no other government official coming close. In this campaign, Pashinyan has deployed a kind of ‘feel-good’ depoliticizing messaging style online, symbolized by the hand-heart symbol encasing the map of Armenia, yet his campaign trail encounters have also exposed his capacity to shift into excoriating invective against specific groups. This is a reminder that if many international audiences know Pashinyan as a smiling progressive, many in Armenia remember him as a town square firebrand. 

Pashinyan has certainly been able to leverage geopolitical fluidity and growing interest in Armenia, especially from Western countries, and this has arguably fortified his electoral campaign. The International Republican Institute’s May poll, after April’s EU summits in Yerevan, found that 61% of respondents felt that Armenia was moving in the right direction, compared to 47% in February (even if the responses are sharply polarized by party preferences). While tilting in the direction of Europe corresponds to the majority’s wishes at present in Armenia, Pashinyan’s leadership will likely be judged on its capacity to reroute among the competing geopolitical pressures that Armenia faces.

To what extent have the policy, political, territorial and societal repercussions of developments during Prime Minister Pashinyan’s tenure - particularly since 2020 shaped both public support for and discontent with his leadership and long-term political durability inside Armenian society? How successfully have opposition figures such as Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan been able to channel and mobilize these sentiments among largely undecided voters, and what factors have limited their ability to offer a cohesive and broadly credible electoral alternative?

Prime Minister Pashinyan has governed Armenia through an era of catastrophes, from the Second Karabakh War to the multiple escalations and Azerbaijan’s large-scale offensive in September 2022 that followed, to the final loss of Mountainous Karabakh in 2023. The political and social repercussions of these developments for Armenia can hardly be overstated. They also mean that the main difference between this election and the previous, snap election in 2021 is that the situation in Mountainous Karabakh, in all its complexity and its involvement of external actors, has to all intents and purposes disappeared from the agenda of this election. This may account on the one hand for the lackluster performance of the opposition in this campaign compared to 2021, when different possible outcomes in Mountainous Karabakh could be imagined and campaigned for.

On the other hand, the outcomes of the last three years have freed Pashinyan’s hand to redefine the meaning of Karabakh in Armenia’s political culture. He has done this by advocating for a new vision of ‘Real Armenia,’ an agenda that centres the primacy of the Republic of Armenia, and the population, geography and symbols within its borders over all other mental and historical landscapes of Armenia. This idea flies in the face of the popular wisdom that held before 2020 that “there is no Armenia without Karabakh”, and the centrality of Karabakh as an all-encompassing metaphor for Armenian ideals, futures and aspirations. 

Pashinyan has completely inverted these prior associations to transform Karabakh into an all-encompassing metaphor for threats to Armenian security, sovereignty and well-being. He has asserted the idea that not only is there an Armenia without Karabakh, but that Armenia is better off without Karabakh at the centre of his political brand. 

Albeit in negated form, Karabakh is implicitly on the ballot of this election, moreover in a context where Azerbaijan’s legal ownership of Karabakh has been powerfully reinforced by international acquiescence to its incorporation of Karabakh in September 2023 and its military control over the territory appears impregnable. ‘Real Armenia’ is therefore a fait accompli, even if many in Armenian civil society are concerned at the enforced amnesia that this slogan seems to entail with regard to the Karabakh movement and how it ended. 

In the face of these realities, opposition figures whose entire careers have been founded on the Karabakh movement and premise of unification are yesterday’s men. They are not only inseparably associated with strategic choices widely held in the population to have brought Armenia to the calamities of recent years, but also with the previous authoritarian-oligarchic regime against which Armenians revolted en masse in 2018’s Velvet Revolution. In the context of this election, they do not have a plausible forward-looking project. Their advocacy of improving frayed ties with Russia confronts the fundamental reappraisal of Armenian-Russian relations proceeding from what many Armenians view as Russia’s breaking in 2020-23 of the “contract” by which Russia was supposed to provide for Armenia’s security in return for the latter’s allegiance. 

The violation of this ‘rescue fantasy’ is a specifically Armenian sub-thread in the wider Eurasian estrangement from Russia proceeding from its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. None of this is to deny the continuing asymmetries in the Armenian-Russian relationship, in which concerning areas such as access to cheap energy, trade, food security and migrant labour, Moscow “holds the cards”. Yet the patron-client relationship of old has been shattered, possibly irreparably, and Yerevan now seeks a more delimited, transactional relationship. Furthermore, the more that Russia uses its levers to disincentivize or punish this recalibration, the more that Pashinyan can position himself as the defender of Armenian sovereignty, validating the premise of ‘Real Armenia'. 

What role have polarization, political messaging, disinformation, and external influence narratives played in shaping the election environment? How seriously are allegations of Russian interference, Karapetyan's oligarchic influence networks, or attempts to build a Georgian-style political model inside Armenia being taken within the country’s political sphere?

These dynamics are certainly serving to shape what is at times a viciously contested environment around the elections. They keep the focus on geopolitical, conspiratorial and sensationalist storylines, on the external aspects of this election, and not on substantive discussions over socio-economic policies and other internal issues. They replicate and perpetuate a reductive approach to the South Caucasus and its politics as being legible primarily through a geopolitical prism, which of course ultimately circumscribes the agency of the people living in the region to decide outcomes. How effective disinformation and external influence narratives actually are will not be clear until after the election, but as of the end of May it did not appear that these efforts were resulting in lower polling numbers for Prime Minister Pashinyan and his Civil Contract party. 

My sense is that the potential for establishing a Georgian-style political model in Armenia is taken very seriously but may be for now seen as premature. We have seen in other cases that protracted and unproductive accession scenarios to the EU eventually lead to a corresponding backlash in candidate countries, estrangement, and reorientation away from the EU. Even if polls show that a majority of Armenia’s citizens currently look favourably upon EU accession, it would be sensible to assume that over the long-term this metric will fluctuate. For the reasons described above, a reorientation towards Russia faces specific conjunctural obstacles in the Armenian case and lacks a credible internal advocate. 

However, given the scale of structural constraints on a European pathway, including Armenia’s membership of the Eurasian Union, Georgia’s stalling of its own European pathway and Brussels’ preoccupation with Ukrainian and Moldovan accessions (not to mention a host of other issues), future conjunctures may favour the politics of backlash in Armenia – although the forms this may take, if it happens, will be specifically Armenian. 

What are the main expectations surrounding the election outcome, and is there any realistic black swan scenario, such as the Karapetyan factor, that could significantly alter the current trajectory of the race despite the ruling party’s apparent advantage in polls and political positioning?

Predictions are a fool’s errand, but the expectation in this election emanating from opinion polling is that Nikol Pashinyan and his Civil Contract party will win this election. While Samvel Karapetyan has offered a stronger challenge than that associated with the previous two presidents of Armenia, he has not provided a sufficiently differentiated vision and shares with them a strong association with Russia. While economic and social ties with Russia remain strong in Armenia, the uncertainty surrounding Russia’s future makes it challenging to assert a compelling electoral campaign predicated on Armenia’s future ties with that country. The questions that confront this election would appear to revolve more around the narrative battle over its conduct and legitimacy, whether protests will follow the outcome and how they will be dealt with, and the distribution of the vote and the leeway that Pashinyan, if indeed he does win, might have to pursue his programme. Over the long-term, however, Armenia faces a very difficult process of reconciling the schism within its body politic left by the Karabakh movement and its violent denouement. 

If Pashinyan secures another mandate, what is Civil Contract's broader political project for the next five years likely to look like, particularly regarding EU integration, relations with Russia, the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process, regional connectivity initiatives, and Armenia’s long-term democratic trajectory? Conversely, what competitive, visionary, and convincing options is the opposition offering?

The principal vectors for another Civil Contract’s mandate are already clear. I would expect substantial efforts to be put into both progressing the political track of peace with Azerbaijan, namely the final signing of an agreement, and the connectivity track, namely sustained attention to the implementation of the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). As we know, the latter requires a new constitution, and hence I would anticipate a contested process over the enactment of a constitutional referendum. How that unfolds in part depends on the result on 7 June. 

About Armenia’s wider geopolitical positioning, I expect that while this will continue to be widely framed in terms of shifts and pivots within a binary field between Russia and “the West”, Armenia will in fact pursue a strategy of multi-alignment across the far more complex, multipolar field that is the reality of the South Caucasus today. Armenia will be living with strategic ambiguity for some time, inhabiting geopolitical waiting rooms and decompression chambers as it navigates the complexities of accessions and exits of rival blocs. I do not expect any clear resolution to these processes, as the “vectoral geopolitics” of bloc membership may not be the salient model of geopolitics in the near future. Rather, a more ‘nodal geopolitics’ is likely a projection in which Armenia, similar to Azerbaijan and increasingly Georgia, will seek to leverage its location as a nexus between regions, blocs, and economies. 

In this setting, it is political leadership that can maneuver between different poles and partnerships that will be best able to navigate the challenges ahead. As such, “vectoral opposition”, which is to say opposition that draws its resources, ideology, and modus operandi from one particular geopolitical vector, may not be convincing, yet whether it will be competitive will depend largely on external developments and how they refract back into Armenian domestic politics.   

Interview conducted by Luka Okropirashvili for Caucasus Watch