Armenia’s continued movement away from Moscow will depend on the passage of constitutional reforms.
The results of the June 7 Armenian national elections are in, and Russia’s attempt to reclaim its waning influence in the South Caucasus has suffered a major setback. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s victory underscores Moscow’s failure to install a leadership more receptive to Russian interests in Yerevan.
The next steps will be crucial. Whether Armenia continues its gradual shift toward the West, advances regional normalization, and strengthens its economic sovereignty will depend on the government’s ability to secure the constitutional changes necessary to finalize a peace agreement with Azerbaijan. Washington should pay close attention and encourage Yerevan to move forward. The opportunities for peace, increased prosperity, and greater US influence in an area historically dominated by Russia are also at stake. If successfully implemented, the reforms in Armenia could help prevent unresolved Soviet-era disputes from resurfacing in the future.
Armenia’s Central Electoral Commission confirmed that Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party won 49.7–49.8 percent of the vote, securing 64 seats in the new 105-seat National Assembly. The more pro-Moscow opposition coalition Strong Armenia won 29 seats (23.2 percent), while the Armenia Alliance won 12 seats (9.9 percent). A marginal 0.01 percent difference kept another pro-Russian party, Prosperous Armenia, below the 4 percent threshold required for parliamentary representation. Pashinyan’s party retained a governing majority, but lost seven of the 71 seats it held in the current legislature.
The opposition has rejected the election results and begun mobilizing supporters, while the government is preparing further action against Kremlin-linked political adversaries. The election unfolded amid growing Russian pressure on Armenia. On June 15, the head of SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, Sergei Naryshkin, dismissed the election outcome as “relatively inconclusive and somewhat questionable.” This signals Moscow’s intent to continue exploiting Armenia’s domestic fault lines even though its allies were electorally unsuccessful.
While the Kremlin can be expected to encourage the Armenian opposition to continue casting doubt on the election’s legitimacy, the battle has shifted to the far more critical task of preventing the prime minister’s party from amending the constitution. Civic Contract fell short of the two-thirds supermajority needed for constitutional amendments, which is particularly significant because Azerbaijan has made constitutional reform a prerequisite for finalizing the 2025 peace agreement.
The constitutional issue is frequently misunderstood. The dispute does not rest on an explicit territorial claim within the constitution’s articles, but on the preamble’s incorporation of Armenia’s Declaration of Independence as a foundational legal reference. That declaration invokes the 1989 decision on the “reunification” of Armenia and what it terms “Nagorno-Karabakh,” embedding a historical claim to territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan. This creates a legal and symbolic claim that Baku views as preserving both a territorial claim and the Soviet-era nomenclature for Karabakh, while other countries formerly bound by the Soviet Union are rejecting Moscow-imposed place names.
A treaty signed by the Pashinyan government today cannot neutralize constitutional provisions that future governments may reinterpret. From Azerbaijan’s perspective, peace must rest on legal permanence rather than political contingency. So long as Armenia’s constitutional framework continues to derive authority from texts that include historical references to Karabakh, the risk persists that a future government could reopen territorial claims. Constitutional reform thus becomes a central test of whether Armenia is prepared to translate diplomatic normalization into an irreversible acceptance of post-Soviet borders.
Pashinyan has argued that constitutional amendments are necessary not only to advance normalization with Azerbaijan but also to support broader institutional reforms at home. If he can assemble the roughly 70 votes needed in parliament, his relatively strong popular mandate would then give him the political space to frame the referendum as a national endorsement of peace with Azerbaijan and potentially mobilize sufficient public support for passage.
With his party six seats short of the supermajority required for constitutional amendments, one option for Pashinyan is to construct a cross-party parliamentary coalition around narrowly defined reform provisions rather than attempting to secure wholesale opposition alignment. This would likely involve issue-by-issue bargaining with centrist or pragmatic opposition elements, focusing on specific constitutional clauses tied to the peace agreement while avoiding broader ideological alignment.
This strategy would require framing the amendments as technical prerequisites for international normalization rather than as partisan concessions, thereby lowering the political cost of opposition deputies supporting them. Even if full cooperation is not achievable, partial defections or abstentions from non-aligned blocs could be sufficient to bridge the six-seat gap and meet the two-thirds threshold.
The Trump administration could facilitate by providing diplomatic cover and sequencing support to help translate Armenia’s parliamentary arithmetic into a viable constitutional referendum pathway. This would mean leveraging Washington’s relationship with both Armenia and Azerbaijan to reinforce the logic of constitutional adjustment to consolidate the broader settlement associated with the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP) connectivity framework.
By doing so, the United States would be aligning institutional stabilization in Yerevan with the strategic objective of opening and securing the Trans-Caspian corridor at a moment when both Russia and Iran are comparatively constrained. From a US perspective, this creates an opportunity to entrench long-term influence in the South Caucasus by anchoring peace, infrastructure, and regulatory alignment within a Western-backed regional order.
About the Author: Kamran Bokhari
Kamran Bokhari, PhD, is a senior resident fellow at the Middle East Policy Council and a senior director at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington. A strategic forecaster, Bokhari teaches Eurasian geopolitics at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program. Dr. Bokhari is the author of Political Islam in the Age of Democratization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
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