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Armenia goes to the polls – and its future hangs in the balance
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“There is a future,” shouts Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia’s prime minister, as he walks with a crowd of supporters in Ararat, a small town outside the capital Yerevan.

Three years since he came to power in Armenia in a peaceful revolution, this is Pashinyan’s slogan for a country emerging from the trauma of last year’s brutal war with Azerbaijan which ended in humiliating defeat.

In 2018, he walked through most of the country on foot on his way to Yerevan, building momentum to successfully challenge an entrenched regime. But this weekend, the country will vote in a highly charged parliamentary election that is, in effect, a referendum on three years of Pashinyan’s reforms which were stymied by conflict.

Many voters will be asking how far Pashinyan’s slogan really goes in the current situation. In the wake of the defeat over Karabakh, sealed in a Russian-brokered ceasefire last November, Armenia has faced what feels like an apocalyptic situation.

Chaos, confusion and blame reign in public, as the country attempts to process the loss of Karabakh and some 3,705 soldiers (over 250 are also missing) and a challenge to the very integrity of the country itself as borders are redrawn.

Backlash by protesters

Clashes and kidnappings at Armenia’s borders, now patrolled closely by Azerbaijani forces, have made security an urgent priority. And the country’s old inside players – who reorganised themselves after the 2018 revolution – have entered the contest to decide Armenia’s future.

Right after the ceasefire agreement on 10 November last, anti-Pashinyan protesters stormed the country’s parliament. Against a backdrop of territorial concessions, a coalition group called the Homeland Salvation Movement – composed of 17 opposition parties and headed by a former prime minister – held sit-in protests in Yerevan for months. However, these yielded no results.

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/armenia-goes-to-the-polls-and-its-future-hangs-in-the-balance/