In Australia, One Nation continues to carry all before it in the opinion polls. But in Europe things are looking rather different. Nigel Farage’s Reform may have passed its peak in Britain, and is now trailing in the polls for next week’s crucial by-election. And as you get closer to Ukraine, Putinism has even less appeal; pro-Russian parties were heavily defeated last year in Romania and Moldova, and just two months ago in Hungary.
And now there’s Armenia, which went to the polls last Sunday, with prime minister Nikol Pashinyan seeking a third term in office. This was the first election since the 2023 loss of the war in Artsakh and consequent expulsion or flight of more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians. It would be no surprise if the government that had presided over such a disaster was turfed out – back in 2021, when the conflict was already going badly, I remarked that “Governments that lose wars rarely survive the experience.”
But the blame game over the war is intimately tied up with Armenia’s geopolitical situation. Russia is its traditional ally, but Russian help over Artsakh was not forthcoming: partly because Vladimir Putin was fully occupied in Ukraine, and partly because he was less inclined to help anyway since Armenia’s turn towards democracy (and therefore at least in some sense towards Europe) after the revolution of 2018.
The Europeans, on the other hand, had leant towards Azerbaijan in the war, from which Pashinyan apparently took the lesson that he needed to work to get them on side for the future. Last year the Armenian parliament approved legislation to apply for European Union membership (although no application has yet been lodged), and last month Pashinyan hosted a summit of the European Political Community. EU membership is popular in Armenia; even though geographers usually locate it in Asia, as Christians with primarily Muslim antagonists (Azerbaijan and Turkey) its people tend to identify strongly with Europe.
As a result, Russian hostility to Pashinyan has become much more obvious. Although a diplomatic front has been maintained, and Armenia continues to host a Russian military base, Putin’s influence was thrown in the scale against the government, primarily in supporting the new church-backed and pro-Russian party Strong Armenia.*
It was, however, to no avail. Pashinyan’s centrist party, Civil Contract, suffered only a modest swing against it, dropping 4.1% to 49.9%, and lost seven seats, retaining a comfortable majority with 64 of the 105 seats (although less than the two-thirds it would need for constitutional amendment). Strong Armenia managed 23.3% and 29 seats, while the Armenia Alliance, previously the main opposition force and also pro-Russian, fell to 9.9% and 12 seats.
A third opposition party, Prosperous Armenia, fell just short of the 4% threshold for representation – and when I say just short, I really mean that. According to the figures on the official website (albeit in Armenian), it has 58,378 out of a total of 1,459,455 votes, which works out to 3.99999%. But the electoral commission explained that adding in the small number of online votes brought that number down to 3.996%, still much too close to be definitive on what are still just provisional results.
Things like that raise suspicions about the fairness of the process, and Armenia has been accused of democratic backsliding in recent months. But international observers reported no major problems, and there seems no doubt that elections are a lot fairer than they were before 2018. Either way, Pashinyan has a clear mandate to push ahead with his pro-European agenda.
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* Despite that, Pashinyan managed to secure Donald Trump’s endorsement.
The World is Not Enough 