On July 4, after six days and some 50 hours of hearings, Armenia’s Constitutional Court rejected petitions from seven opposition forces and upheld the results of the June 7 parliamentary election. The ruling is final and cannot be appealed. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party holds 64 seats; and the last institutional avenue for contesting the vote is closed. By the account that traveled fastest — Reuters framed it as the court rejecting a “pro-Russia opposition” and solidifying Armenia’s Western pivot — the system worked and the matter is settled.
Within hours, five opposition forces jointly declared “a new phase of political resistance.” Both things deserve attention: what the court settled and why nothing feels settled.
I wrote in the Weekly last month that the OSCE’s preliminary report told a harder story than the celebratory coverage: a campaign shaped by more than 200 criminal proceedings concentrated on the opposition, which the mission said produced perceptions of selective justice. What happened after the vote extended that story rather than ending it, and it is worth assembling the record in one place because the record is what the fastest framings leave out.
The decisive post-election contest was never the overall result. Civil Contract won by roughly 26 points; no serious person claims a falsified national tally. The contest was at the 4% threshold, where the Prosperous Armenia party sat at 3.996% — and where the Central Electoral Commission annulled the results of three polling stations in which the party had votes, citing genuine Election Day violations. The party’s own candidate, Suren Surenyants, acknowledged the violations. His objection was to the remedy: Annulment erased the votes without giving the disenfranchised voters another say. A Yerevan court reviewing the dispute indicated that a revote should be held. The commission refused.
Its chairman, Vahagn Hovakimyan, explained the refusal in terms that deserve to be quoted for as long as this election is discussed: A revote risked “tactical voting” by other opposition supporters seeking to help Prosperous Armenia cross the threshold. The stated objection to letting voters vote was that the opposition party might clear the bar. Daniel Ioannisyan of the Independent Observer coalition said he had not expected the commission “to break the law to such an extent,” arguing that the party had already won enough votes in those precincts on June 7. With Prosperous Armenia excluded, Civil Contract’s 64 seats include a three-fifths majority — enough to appoint the prosecutor general, judges and senior officials without a single opposition vote. In his closing argument before the Constitutional Court, Prosperous Armenia’s lawyer, Aram Orbelyan, told the judges that the commission’s own chairman had admitted that, absent the annulment of those stations, the party would have passed the threshold.
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That is the decision the Constitutional Court has now upheld. The court’s relationship to the ruling party is not a matter of a simple appointment tally. It is a matter of documented history: In 2020, Pashinyan’s government openly campaigned to remake this court, passing a constitutional amendment that forced out its chairman, Hrayr Tovmasyan, and removed its three longest-serving judges over their protests that the move was, in Tovmasyan’s words, an attempt to “take control of the court.”
The judges elected since have come through a parliament Civil Contract has dominated for the court’s entire recent history — such that all but one judge were appointed during the tenure of a single political force. Two of those judges had ruling-party histories direct enough that the court itself removed them from this case — a genuine act of self-policing that complicates any flat claim of a rubber stamp. But the plaintiffs’ request to recuse a third judge, whom they described as openly hostile to the opposition, was refused.
And there is the matter Strong Armenia raised in the proceedings themselves: In January, Justice Minister Srbuhi Galyan presented a law significantly raising the Constitutional Court judges’ salaries — some 46.8 million drams, about $129,000, across the nine justices — which Civil Contract adopted before the election. Judicial pay raises have been announced government policy for years; what the opposition flagged was the conjunction: the court in question, the timing and the fact that the same minister who moved the raise then represented the ruling party before those judges in this case. None of this proves the ruling was wrong. All of it explains why the ruling, whatever its legal merits, could not produce legitimacy — because legitimacy is precisely what a court largely built, and recently benefited, by one party cannot confer on that party’s contested victory.
The government’s conduct during the proceedings did not help. Two days after the vote, prosecutors opened a tax case against Prosperous Armenia’s leader, Gagik Tsarukyan, and barred him from leaving the country; the authorities have since moved to strip his parliamentary immunity and revoked the license of his casino. Opposition activist Avetik Chalabyan was remanded to two months’ detention for allegedly inciting officials of another country to send Armenian workers home to vote for the opposition. Pashinyan himself has said publicly that the three opposition leaders should be imprisoned. Whatever each case’s individual merits, their cumulative direction is not subtle, and it ran uninterrupted through the very weeks the court deliberated.
Legitimacy is precisely what a court largely built, and recently benefited, by one party cannot confer on that party’s contested victory.
The geopolitical frame completed itself with almost theatrical timing. Two days before the ruling, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stood in Yerevan — fresh from Baku, where she had congratulated Ilham Aliyev for “initiating a historic peace agreement with Armenia” — pledging that Armenia can count on the EU and that if Russia closes its market to Armenian goods, Europe will open its own. As she arrived, a rally in Yerevan demanded the release of political prisoners. Russia, which had not congratulated Pashinyan, is reportedly preparing a second sanctions package. Foreign backing for one side of Armenia’s internal contest is a criminal charge; foreign backing for the other is a support package. That asymmetry is simply the record.
What comes next was announced within hours of the verdict. The five opposition forces’ joint statement names four priorities, and the first is the one that matters most: preventing the constitutional amendments that Pashinyan’s peace framework with Azerbaijan requires — amendments the opposition calls an “irreversible blow” to sovereignty imposed under Baku’s pressure. Here, the election’s arithmetic becomes the country’s future.
Civil Contract fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to call the referendum through parliament. The justice minister has said the government may be able to initiate it anyway, without explaining how; Armenian news reports say the ruling party’s plan relies on drawing opposition deputies to its side. The signal of intent came fast: Within days, the ruling party moved to replace the outgoing parliament speaker with Ruben Rubinyan, its deputy speaker and the government’s envoy in the normalization talks with Turkey — aligning the legislature’s leadership with the very agenda the opposition has vowed to block. A government that secured its margins through subtraction now needs additions, and an opposition that lost every institutional battle has made blocking the referendum its reason for existing.
A fair accounting must include what cuts the other way. Civil Contract’s support is real: A plurality of Armenians, at nearly 59% turnout, chose this government over an opposition tied in the public mind to the discredited pre-2018 order and to Moscow. The court did police two of its own conflicts. The institutions functioned enough to be used: Recounts occurred, courts heard the disputes, the process ran to its legal conclusion. This is not a consolidated autocracy. It is something more instructive: a democracy demonstrating, step by step, how the space around a real electoral result can be narrowed — through prosecution, annulment, refusal and ratification — while every individual step retains a legal justification.
The court closed the last door on the June 7 election. But the legitimacy it could not confer has gone somewhere, and it has gone to the streets and to the referendum fight. The question the ruling answered was whether the results stand. The question it could not answer — whether they deserve to — is now the entire substance of Armenian politics.
