Next Year’s Elections Must Break the Cycle of Political Violence in Armenia

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Political violence in Armenia often emerges at critical junctures when peace has appeared possible. Next year’s parliamentary elections could test whether the country has finally broken that cycle.

Less than a month ago, Armenia marked the 26th anniversary of the 27 October 1999 assassinations in the National Assembly. Eight senior officials were gunned down live on Armenian television. Among them were newly elected Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan and Parliamentary Speaker Karen Demirchyan. How the gunmen managed to enter the building unimpeded and fully armed still remains a mystery despite stated commitments to solve the case.

Conspiracy theories have abounded ever since, the most prevalent concerning the belief that Armenia and Azerbaijan were planning to sign some kind of agreement at the OSCE Summit scheduled for Istanbul three weeks later. Further fuelling such rumours, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot had visited Yerevan the same day as the killings. Although Sargsyan, a former defence minister often considered the most powerful man in Armenia, had been instrumental in forcing Armenia’s first president to resign over a year earlier, specifically over Karabakh, it was said as prime minister that he understood the dire straits the country was in.

Sargsyan believed Armenia’s economic woes could not be fully addressed by increasing tax collection or other quick fixes, but by freeing it from the burden of the country’s untenable position as a landlocked country, regionally semi-isolated, and lacking any major natural resources. Only by forging stronger economic ties with the outside world could it develop its full potential, it is said, Sargsyan realised, and only by resolving Armenia’s conflict with Azerbaijan could that be achieved. 

There were other theories, of course. Sargsyan’s anti-corruption drive had irked Armenia’s oligarchs, opined some, Russia was behind the attack, believed others, and some even considered that Robert Kocharyan, the former de facto Karabakh leader, made Armenian prime minister by Levon Ter-Petrosyan in 1997, sought to eradicate what he feared could become powerful opposition to his rule. Kocharyan, incidentally, had been one of those alongside Sargsyan that forced Ter-Petrosyan, then president, to resign in February 1998, facilitating his own rise to power. 

It was only in the aftermath of the 27 October assassinations that Kocharyan consolidated that new presidential power. Coincidentally, the same day as the shootings, Kocharyan’s preferred candidate for Catholicos, Karekin II, was elected in an ecumenical vote that some allege had been manipulated or falsified. What followed was what has been called the Karabakh Clan.

Ter-Petrosyan’s former presidential advisor, Gerard Libaridian, charged that even if the reason for the assassination remains unknown, the wider ramification is – it marked the first time violence was used to shape domestic politics. Libaridian suggested that this was the inevitable result of a mindset that rationalised violence in the face of often self-fulfilling existential narratives of imminent doom. This, he believed, came from a “rhetoric of hatred and betrayal” perpetuated by “demagogues offering simplistic solutions to the nation’s manifold woes.”   

Later, the following year after the November 2003 Rose Revolution in neighbouring Georgia, an emboldened opposition took to the streets of Yerevan in their own attempt to overthrow. They were met with extreme force. In March 2008, Kocharyan’s response was even more brutal following presidential elections transferring power to his trusted lieutenant, Serzh Sargsyan, when his final term ran its course.

There was a sense of deja vu. Serzh Sargsyan had also been part of the troika with Kocharyan and Vazgen Sargsyan that brought down Ter-Petrosyan ten years earlier. A decade later, they were again pitted against him in his new role as leader of the opposition. With him was a young opposition newspaper editor and journalist, Nikol Pashinyan. When the opposition gathered in Yerevan’s Liberty Square was dispersed by riot police in the morning, and Ter-Petrosyan was placed under house arrest, it was Pashinyan that led them in the final showdown later that day. He personally organised the barricades ahead of the inevitable clashes in the evening.

Ten people died, including two policemen, and a state of emergency was declared. The army patrolled Yerevan for 20 days. Pashinyan went into hiding. 

Three months after the four-day war with Azerbaijan in April 2016, violence again resurfaced when rumours spread that then Sargsyan, now president, was under pressure to accept the so-called Lavrov Plan in which five out of seven regions then occupied by Armenian forces would be handed back to Azerbaijan as part of a peace deal. The remaining two regions would be returned later dependent on Karabakh's status. There were calls for the release of Lebanese-Armenian Jirair Sefilyan, an imprisoned former Lebanese-Armenian military commander, by the ultra-nationalist Sasna Tsrer militant group made up of former Karabakh war veterans. A police station was seized, hostages taken, and three policemen died. 

Since the 44-day-war with Azerbaijan in 2020 and new momentum towards an agreement to end the conflict following Armenia’s defeat, that same feeling of deja vu waits in the wings.

With 2025 almost at a close, attention is increasingly focusing on next year’s parliamentary elections in Armenia. It will be the first regularly scheduled vote since 2017. All subsequent national votes under Pashinyan’s premiership have been extraordinary snap elections. Arguably, they have also not been held in normal times. In December 2018, Pashinyan won with over 70 percent of the vote but on the back of large street protests that not only forced Sargsyan to resign that April but  still gathered whenever Pashinyan sought to force his way. This included forcing Sargsyan’s majority Republican Party to trigger early elections that December. 

The new parliament did not last long. A little over six months after the 44-day-war in 2020, Pashinyan called snap elections again. On the campaign trail in June 2021, Pashinyan brandished a steel hammer, adorned with a ribbon in the colours of the Armenian flag, warning that it would “fall down” on “empty heads.” When a complaint was filed with the constitutional court, he claimed that it symbolised a “dictatorship of law and justice,” and was not an incitement to violence.

The opposition, led by Pashinyan’s traditional foes, Kocharyan and his main support base, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation – Dashnaktsutyun (ARF-D), along with Sargsyan’s Pativ Unem (I Have Honour) bloc of the mainly ruling Republican Party, had no chance. The two political groupings attracted 21.11 and 5.22 percent of the vote in those elections compared to 53.95 percent for Pashinyan’s Civil Contract. That created the situation today where a majority Pashinyan government is locked into a bitter conflict with the opposition over the future of the country. Once again, this particularly means an Armenia-Azerbaijan peace. 

Even opposition protests in Yerevan in 2022 and 2023 failed to unite popular anger or at least dissatisfaction sufficient to oust Pashinyan. His popularity, however, has continued to wane, with recent surveys held by the International Republican Institute (IRI) and local pollster MPG – Gallup International putting his electoral chances at around 17 percent of the vote. His only comfort is that Kocharyan hardly fares any better with 6.4 percent and Sargsyan with just 3.4 percent. A myriad of other parties fail to even register, mostly managing just 1 percent or even less. Moreover, a huge swathe of the electorate that said they would not vote, and 16.3 percent refused to answer. 

That could change if new political actors emerge on the scene. In the MPG survey, Samvel Karapetyan, a Russian-Armenian billionaire, came out of nowhere with 13.4 percent. Karapetyan was detained in June charged with planning a coup in the country alongside several high-ranking clergy. The charges are disputed although in September 2024, Armenia’s National Security Service had already announced that it had arrested several individuals also allegedly planning a coup. There have also been alleged assassination plots against Pashinyan, and it is known that buildings are often swept for possible bombs before he arrives. 

Despite frequent social media posts by Pashinyan presenting himself as able to walk or even cycle freely in the country, it is well known from other videos that the security surrounding him surpasses that of his predecessors. And for good reason. The coming parliamentary elections in Armenia look set to become an existential battle for political survival on both sides. The bitterness also runs deep. Most of the names involved – from the first three presidents to the current prime minister and the head of the church – remain the same even after 25 years. So too does the core issue at the centre of the 7 June 2026 parliamentary elections – peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan. 

It can only be hoped that the outcome will be different.

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