With a decisive victory in the June 7 parliamentary election secured, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan now has to deliver on his promises. Chief among them, his foreign policy reset. 

While the results appear to offer a broad endorsement of Pashinyan’s efforts to reduce Yerevan’s dependence on Russia by building ties with the United States and European Union, they may muddle efforts to finalize a peace agreement with Azerbaijan. 

Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party won just under 50 percent of the vote on Sunday and appears set to win about 64 seats in the 105-seat National Assembly. That’s down from 53 percent of ballots cast and 71 seats won in the 2021 snap elections. A pair of pro-Russian parties, Strong Armenia and the Armenia Alliance, netted about 29 and 12 seats respectively. 

Crucially, Civil Contract’s electoral results mean the party’s seat allotment falls short of the two-thirds majority it needs to call a referendum on a new constitution, which is seen as a key element in completing a peace deal with Azerbaijan. 

“This election has, paradoxically, both reaffirmed the peace agenda in the sense that Pashinyan has won, and has won with a decent majority,” said Laurence Broers, an expert on the Caucasus at Chatham House, a London think tank. “On the other hand, it has thrown the whole peace process in its current configuration into doubt.” 

Strong Armenia, financed by Armenian-Russian oligarch Samvel Karapetyan, and the Armenia Alliance, led by former President Robert Kocharyan, based their election campaigns on trashing Pashinyan’s peace deal framework and casting the prime minister as Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s stooge. 

Aliyev has conditioned the finalization of the peace deal, initialed last August in Washington, on Armenia amending its constitution to expressly renounce any territorial claim on Nagorno Karabakh, which Azerbaijan reconquered in 2023.  The current Armenian constitution references the country’s 1991 declaration of independence, which characterizes Karabakh as a historical part of Armenia. 

Aliyev insists that the reference amounts to a territorial claim. During the Soviet era, Karabakh had the status of an autonomous republic within Azerbaijan. Armenian forces pushed the Azerbaijani army out of the territory, and occupied swathes of Azerbaijan proper, during the First Karabakh War in the 1990s. 

Pashinyan has said he wants to hold a referendum on a new constitution, but that now seems up in the air. 

Civil Contract leaders haven’t given up on the idea, however. 

Justice Minister Srbuhi Galyan told reporters June 10 that Civil Contract MPs had discussed the text of the amended constitution the day before and are pressing ahead with the project, local outlet Panorama reported. She said the party won’t release the draft for now. 

Even if Civil Contract finds a way to call a referendum or change the constitution without one, it’s not clear a majority of Armenians would approve removing the reference to the declaration of independence. 

Many of Pashinyan’s own supporters are skeptical. 

Marguerite Shahinyan, a 69-year-old musicologist who voted at a public school in Yerevan’s southwestern Shengavit District on Sunday, said she’s an enthusiastic Pashinyan supporter because she credits him with bringing peace. But changing the constitution at Aliyev’s demand is a step too far, she told Eurasianet. 

“They don’t have the right to do that. They took it [Karabakh] — land that for centuries, thousands of years, was Armenian,” Shahinyan said, referring to the Azerbaijani reconquest.  “Our constitution must defend us.” 

With a constitutional referendum in limbo, Armenia and Azerbaijan will have to focus on smaller steps to maintain momentum toward a durable peace, including work on the Trump International Route for Peace and Prosperity, Broers told Eurasianet. That gives the United States the “opportunity and responsibility” to remain closely engaged in the region, he said. 

In the months leading up to the election, Pashinyan appeared vulnerable. Opinion polls showed his approval at rock bottom as many Armenians blamed him for the loss of Karabakh. An unseemly conflict with the leadership of the Armenian Apostolic Church didn’t help his approval ratings. 

For many, a vote for Pashinyan was a vote for a lesser evil. Some experts believe his robust parliamentary majority doesn’t necessarily imply a resounding personal mandate. 

“The most realistic leader right now is Nikol Pashinyan,” said 57-year-old small businessman Hakob, who declined to share his last name.

But Pashinyan’s vulgar attacks on opponents and occasional angry outbursts are unbecoming, Hakob told Eurasianet after voting in downtown Yerevan. 

“I’m not against his politics; I’m against his behavior,” he said. 

Pashinyan ran an energetic, upbeat campaign across the country and on social media. His central argument was that making peace with Azerbaijan, normalizing relations with Turkey and building ties with the West are all crucial to economic prosperity. The introduction of a state health insurance system this winter likely played an important role too, Broers noted. 

The opposition’s messaging was overwhelmingly negative and backward looking. A rally for Karapetyan’s Strong Armenia, held on June 3 in Yerevan’s Republic Square, began with videos generated by artificial intelligence depicting Civil Contract campaign buses bringing in Azerbaijanis to take over the Armenian capital. 

The election, which saw strong turnout of nearly 59 percent, offered strong backing for Pashinyan, despite a wide-ranging Russian influence campaign and a steady drumbeat of threats and import bans from the Kremlin. 

Many Armenians, even if still broadly supportive of good relations with Russia, have felt let down by Russia’s failure to fulfill treaty obligations to help Armenia during the Second Karabakh War, which resulted in Azerbaijan’s reconquest of Karabakh. 

“The world is structured so that everyone is dependent on others, but in that case it’s good to have backups, so that one center doesn’t influence everything in your country,” said Albert, a 34-year-old consultant who voted in downtown Yerevan and declined to provide his last name. 

EU officials and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio were quick to congratulate Pashinyan. The response has been cooler from the Kremlin. Russian President Vladimir Putin has not congratulated the prime minister, and Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov equivocated on a post-election meeting of the pair. 

“I expect that there would be some kind of reset in the aftermath of these elections, but this is by no means the last crisis” in Russian-Armenian relations, Broers said. 

International observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe told journalists that in spite of the Russian pressure, Armenians had a genuine choice on the ballot and praised the conduct of the election. 

But the election campaign saw Pashinyan pull a few moves that cast shade on his democratic credentials. His chief rival, Karapetyan, fought the campaign from house arrest on charges that he called for the seizure of power after making critical statements about Pashinyan’s attacks on the church last summer. Money laundering charges were later added. At the same time, investigative reporting has tied Karapetyan to Russia’s dirty tricks campaign against Pashinyan. 

Civil Contract has kept the pressure on the pro-Russian opposition, with authorities announcing dozens of new charges against opposition activists on allegations of vote buying. Authorities also have announced tax fraud charges June 9 against Gagik Tsarukyan, the oligarch leader of the pro-Russian Prosperous Armenia party, which came fourth and may still make it into parliament after a recount. 

The election seems to leave Armenian more polarized than ever. Many of those who cast ballots against Pashinyan did so with revulsion. 

“Society is divided into two camps,” the 71-year-old said. “One side hates the other side.”