The collaborationists have announced the date for the next ‘elections’ in Armenia – 7th June 2026. Of course, there’s no question of any real elections (or even anything remotely resembling them). In the Third Republic, elections as an institution of popular will ceased to exist in 1996, when Levon Ter-Petrosyan – the country’s first president and the spiritual and political mentor of Nikol Pashinyan – refused to recognise his defeat, choosing to retain power with the support of the power unit represented by Vazgen Sargsyan, Serzh Sargsyan, and Robert Kocharyan. Subsequent ‘elections’ have been short-lived soap operas, thanks to which one could demonstrate to the ‘civilised world’ their commitment to high ‘standards of democracy’ and, as an icing on the cake, absorb the corresponding funds.
Many view the upcoming elections as decisive. Should any of the forces represented in parliament win, many undecided citizens who still hope for pennies from heaven will begin leaving the country en masse. This process, which hasn’t stopped since the 1990s, has already accelerated, but 7 June will become a Rubicon for at least a third of Armenia’s population. And the question isn’t whether the Turkish-subject regime will risk wholesale falsification of the elections and/or prevent certain political forces and their representatives from running.
What’s important is, has the immunodeficiency of the Armenian people truly reached that irreversible point after which Armenians sign on their own euthanasia, just to avoid continuing their thousand-year history of resistance?
Though euthanasia is a mild way of putting it, since in Nikol Pashinyan’s ‘real Armenia’ and at his ‘crossroads of peace’, even our voluntary death won’t come without suffering.
Nevertheless, elections, especially in an undemocratic regime, never answer such complex questions. We answer them each minute we tolerate the Turkish collaborationists and the way they kill Armenians through their connivance, incompetence, and inaction. We answer them as we passively observe the creeping occupation of our territories, the annihilation of the foundations of our identity, the dismantling of our army, and the eradication of our faith in our own strength.
As in many post-Soviet countries, elections in Armenia have become plebiscitary in their nature, in other words, they perform as referenda. This was quite natural at the dawn of the Third Republic, and then in the first free elections, when the Armenian people – in Armenia and beyond its borders – chose independence and the struggle for Artsakh at any cost with their votes and resources. During that brief period, the Armenian world recognised the inextricable connection between the former and the latter. Amongst the few, Armenians then chose new, at least seemingly non-communist authorities, confidently rejecting a past without the right to a full-fledged national identity, to the Armenian Church, to Armenian Artsakh.
What happened afterwards we remember vividly and observed successively with each of Armenia’s leaders. The ‘father’ of the Third Republic, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, became intoxicated by the glory brought to him by Armenian warriors and decided not to part with it. To accomplish this, he began seeking eternal glory and power not in the Armenian world, but in permissiveness for his inner circle and surrendering victory to neighbours. The Armenian people gave him a worthy response by not re-electing him for a second term. But Ter-Petrosyan had already decided to permanently deprive Armenians of the right to influence their own fate by falsifying elections, suppressing protests, and intensifying the undermining of the key goal of Armenia’s Declaration of Independence – Miatsum (reunification with Artsakh).
Just two years later, Ter-Petrosyan’s faithful inner circle, which had helped him in this dirty business, decided to take direct possession of the depleted Third Republic. Since then, elections became a relay race, with each lap leaving Armenia weaker and increasingly exhausted. Armenians henceforth chose not programmes, ideologies, or ways of realising national interests, but whether they agreed to another round of humiliation by the current leader and his clique. The leaders themselves answered not to their voters but to external centres of power.
Not once in the entire history of the Third Republic, either in elections or beyond them, has power in Armenia passed to genuine opposition.
Nikol Pashinyan understood this perfectly well when he blackmailed the Armenian people in 2018 with the message ‘Either choose me, or there will be no state.’ By turning Artsakh into the domain of the ‘exes’ (former officials), those utterly undeserving of such an honour – he constructed a false illusion that a corruption-free and economically thriving Armenia was inherently opposed to an Armenia that defends Armenian Artsakh. Accordingly, the head Turk interpreted his victory in the ‘Velvet Revolution’ and the subsequent elections as a mandate to abandon Artsakh.
Needless to say, the first and second are inseparable. Artsakh is a key component of Armenia’s security, including economic security, thanks to which a significant part of the Republic was in the deep rear until 2020. Meanwhile, to preserve Artsakh and maintain the country’s defence capability, economic reforms and the fight against corruption were indeed necessary. Thus, in the 2018 elections, Armenians voted for a false illusion of choice (let us recall that the fight against corruption didn’t happen either, and the corruption of the current leadership breaks historical records).
In the 2021 elections, Armenians proved they hadn’t recognised the illusory nature of this ‘choice’. Whether voting with a relative majority for the Civil Contract, choosing parliamentary forces representing Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan and legitimising Pashinyan, staying home on election day, or emigrating to the United States through Mexican and Texan prisons, we all showed Pashinyan and the entire leadership of the Third Republic that surrendering one of the most ancient strongholds of Armenian civilisation could go unpunished.
He interpreted his victory as another mandate – this time to recognise Artsakh as belonging to Azerbaijan and to destroy Armenian identity in Armenia proper. Of course, he couldn’t be so confident in his luck, and therefore his programme for 2021 elections included the de-occupation of Shushi and Hadrut. His understanding of his mandate proved correct nonetheless, as the programme executed in reverse – the final surrender of Artsakh and deportation of its population with subsequent humiliations initiated by very Armenian rulers, as well as connivance in the occupation of border territories in Tavush, Syunik, and Gegharkunik – brought no negative consequences for the Turkish commandant.
Eventually, Pashinyan decided to bring the work begun by Levon Ter-Petrosyan to its logical conclusion, so as never again to rely on the desires and will of the Armenian people. He found a rather simple solution – the ultimate Turkish colonisation. For this, he needs to overcome the last milestone of the relay race, namely to obtain a mandate from the Armenian world to transfer Armenia to the Turkish world, to liquidate Armenian statehood. This means that by 2031, there will be nothing to ask Armenians about in elections and referenda, even for the sake of propriety.
It’s unsurprising that on the eve of such an inglorious end, this collective serpent has begun devouring itself. These days we observe a public row between the ‘father’ of the Third Republic, Ter-Petrosyan, and its gravedigger and the spiritual son of this ‘father’ simultaneously – Nikol Pashinyan. The 30-year vicious circle has closed.
There will be no magical return of agency in 2026. But if the Armenian world refuses to vote for deception and the illusion of choice, refuses to shake hands with capitulationists formalising the completion of Armenian statehood and those who brought it to this point, perhaps we won’t have to hope that history will give us another chance to choose our own government in another 600 years. So far it appears that Turkey has done its homework better – and this time will wipe out Armenian identity to its foundations. So that benevolent history will have no one left to offer such a chance to.
