Western observers certified the vote, but allegations of intimidation, electoral manipulation, and political bias continue to cast a shadow over Armenia’s future.

Six weeks ago, I warned that Armenia’s June 7 parliamentary election was already being stolen. I take no satisfaction in having been right. I am in Yerevan now, and I have watched the theft completed up close.

A Victory Declared Before the Votes Were Counted

Start with the number the government would rather you skip. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract was declared the winner with 49.8 percent – short of a majority of the Armenians who actually voted, and short of the two-thirds supermajority he needs to deliver the constitutional changes Baku and Ankara demand of him. A leader whose approval is among the lowest of any sitting world leader nonetheless emerged with 64 of 107 seats. The machinery, not the electorate, produced that result.

Consider how it began. At about two o’clock on the morning after polls closed, with the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) having processed barely 10 percent of ballots, drawn mostly from the small rural precincts where his support runs highest – Pashinyan declared victory. The returns still outstanding were the ones he had most reason to fear: Yerevan, the capital, and Gyumri, the second city, which broke heavily for the opposition. The early counts pointed toward a result in which the two main opposition parties combined would outpoll him. He did not wait for them. He announced a win the data did not support and, in doing so, handed the Commission (led by a former ruling party member) its assignment, produce numbers to justify the claim. That is not winning an election; it is usurping power.

An Election That Could Never Be Lost

This was never a normal election. By Pashinyan’s own admission, the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh was “a calculated sacrifice”, and under Armenia’s constitution, deliberately surrendering sovereign territory is an act of treason. A leader who loses power here does not retire to write his memoirs; he faces a reckoning, and very possibly a court martial. For Pashinyan, June 7 was not a contest to be won but a sentence to be avoided. That is the real reason he could not allow it to be free.

Intimidation, Arrests, and Electoral Manipulation

The irregularities are real and they are documented – in the recounts now underway, in the criminal cases opened on election night, in the gaps between the tallies signed at the precincts and the figures the CEC later posted. Those numbers will be litigated for weeks. But to argue the election only on the arithmetic is to concede the smaller ground. An election is not stolen at the ballot box alone. It is stolen in the days before it by a sustained, well-documented campaign of arrests and intimidation of opposition activists.

There is more. On direct orders Pashinyan issued during the televised debate of party-list leaders the night before, a fringe party aligned with him petitioned the CEC, barely thirty-six hours before polls opened, to strip the largest opposition party, Strong Armenia, of its very right to compete. The Commission threw the case out for lack of evidence, but that a sitting prime minister would move, on live television, to delete his strongest rival from the ballot tells you the spirit in which this election was run.