By Tigran Grigoryan
Armenia’s highly polarized and geopolitically charged parliamentary elections have ended with voter turnout reaching 59%, the highest level in recent years and up from 49.4% in the 2021 election, alongside a predictable landslide victory for the ruling Civil Contract party. According to preliminary results, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract received 49.82% of the vote, followed by Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan’s Strong Armenia Alliance with 23.28%. Former President Robert Kocharyan’s Armenia Alliance came third with 9.93%.
The future composition of parliament now depends on whether the fourth-place party, Gagik Tsarukyan’s Prosperous Armenia, ultimately crosses the electoral threshold. After an initial announcement that the party had qualified, the Chair of the Central Electoral Commission stated at a press conference immediately after the completion of vote counting that the inclusion of a small number of electronically cast ballots reduced its result to 3.996%, narrowly below the threshold. Prosperous Armenia has demanded a recount.
Its fate matters because, if Prosperous Armenia fails to enter parliament, Civil Contract will receive three additional mandates, bringing its total to 64 seats. This would give the ruling party a three-fifths majority, significantly expanding its institutional influence. With such a majority, it would be able to appoint or dismiss judges of the Constitutional and Cassation Courts, members of the Supreme Judicial Council, the Prosecutor General, the Human Rights Defender, and several other key independent institutions without relying on opposition support.
However, one thing is already clear: under no scenario will the ruling party obtain a constitutional majority. This limitation will have consequences that extend well beyond Armenia’s domestic politics.
The triumph of resource-driven politics
Although the election represents a convincing victory for Pashinyan, Civil Contract’s dominance will nevertheless be reduced compared with the outgoing parliament, while opposition forces will enjoy greater representation. The campaign once again demonstrated that Armenian politics remains largely a contest of administrative and financial resources. The parties that possessed the strongest administrative and financial capacities were effectively the only serious contenders for parliamentary seats. The absence of a credible pro-democratic alternative to this resource-driven status quo does not bode well for the long-term health of Armenia’s democratic system.
This parliamentary configuration is also likely to reinforce political polarization and the continued dominance of black-and-white politics, leaving little room for substantive policy debates. Such an environment will likely benefit the government, allowing it to continue dismissing criticism by pointing to its principal opponents. This strategy will become even more effective in the new parliament, where the main opposition force will be associated not only with former political elites but, in the public perception, also with Russia.
The absence of a genuinely pro-democratic opposition, combined with Pashinyan’s renewed electoral mandate, weak institutional constraints, and the limited domestic and international pushback against his increasingly illiberal style of governance, may contribute to further democratic backsliding—a trend that has accelerated over the past year.
Foreign policy implications and the limits of diversification
The June 7 vote also carries significant foreign policy implications, particularly for the peace process with Azerbaijan. Baku’s insistence that Armenia amend its constitution before signing a peace treaty has now become considerably more difficult to satisfy. Although the Armenian government has consistently argued that constitutional reform is a purely domestic issue unrelated to Azerbaijan’s demands, in practice, it has tacitly accepted this agenda.
During the campaign, Pashinyan even suggested that failure to secure a constitutional majority could lead to renewed war with Azerbaijan as early as September. The statement was clearly intended for electoral purposes, but the election results nonetheless create a genuine institutional obstacle. Without a constitutional majority, the government lacks the parliamentary strength needed to initiate a constitutional referendum on its own. As a result, the new political balance may place important elements of the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process on hold.
If Baku maintains this precondition, the peace treaty initialed at the Washington Summit in August 2025 could remain unsigned for years. This would also affect Armenia’s normalization process with Turkey, as Ankara has linked full normalization to the signing of an Armenia–Azerbaijan peace agreement. Consequently, continued uncertainty surrounding the treaty also complicates the prospects for regional connectivity projects such as TRIPP. If only a single transport route is opened while broader regional communications remain blocked, the expected benefits of the project for Armenia would be significantly diminished.
These elections have often been portrayed internationally as a black-and-white choice between Russia and the West. Such a framing oversimplifies the realities on the ground.
The real divide is between the government’s policy of diversification, pursued since the autumn of 2022, and the opposition’s preference for closer ties with Moscow. Armenia is currently in no position to make a binary choice between Russia and the West. If Moscow forces such a choice, Yerevan will most likely have to accommodate Russia, at least in the short- to medium-term.
Despite its declared diversification strategy and tangible progress in areas such as defense cooperation, Armenia remains heavily dependent on Russia in trade, the broader economy, and energy. These structural dependencies cannot be eliminated overnight. Throughout the election campaign, Moscow used them as a source of leverage over Pashinyan—a pressure campaign that likely helped consolidate his electoral position rather than weaken it.
Beyond the electoral context, however, this pressure is intended to discourage Armenia from pursuing more ambitious policies, including reducing Russian control over strategic assets, advancing discussions on EU membership, or taking other steps that Moscow views as unfriendly. Given these constraints, Pashinyan is likely to moderate his position on certain issues while continuing to pursue diversification incrementally and cautiously, seeking to avoid provoking the Kremlin while gradually expanding Armenia’s strategic options.
The article was originally published on CivilNet.