Pashinyan government prosecuted opposition figures before vote

On June 7, Armenians went to the polls, and by the narrow measure that draws international headlines, the day went well. The OSCE’s observation mission assessed voting positively in 98% of the polling stations it watched. Turnout was just under 59%. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party retained its majority. Foreign leaders sent congratulations. The story, as it traveled, was that Armenian democracy had passed a test. The OSCE’s own preliminary report tells a less comfortable story, and it is worth reading past the first paragraph. The mission’s central concern was not election day. It was the months before it. The campaign, the observers found, was “marked by allegations of vote-buying and other electoral violations that led to numerous criminal proceedings against opposition candidates and activists, resulting in many opposition supporters refraining from actively engaging in the campaign.” The prosecutions did not merely run alongside the race. They shaped who felt free to compete in it. The numbers are not small. Armenia’s Investigative Committee opened more than 129 criminal proceedings after the election was called, most of them tied to the opposition Strong Armenia. Eighty-nine people were charged; 20 were in pretrial detention on election day; 13 were under house arrest. A separate Anti-Corruption Committee track initiated prosecutions against 209 people. The committee published more than 20 intercepted private conversations of the accused on its website, material that was then amplified by ruling party social media accounts. At one point, Pashinyan announced an opposition candidate’s arrest a day before it happened. The OSCE’s language was measured but unmistakable: These patterns “contributed to perceptions of selective justice.” This is the part of the election that mattered, and it is the part most coverage set aside in favor of a cleaner narrative. There was also real foreign pressure, and the OSCE took it seriously. Russia imposed trade restrictions on Armenian exports during the campaign, and Armenia faced a documented Russian disinformation effort. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that Armenia was targeted by the Kremlin-linked operation known as Storm-1516 more than any other country in the world between April 2025 and April 2026; France’s disinformation watchdog, Viginum, and Germany’s foreign intelligence service have identified the same network as a Russian influence operation. Researchers at NewsGuard and Clemson University tracked hundreds of fabricated videos and coordinated activity across roughly 1,000 accounts on X, including an AI-generated clip mimicking a Euronews broadcast that falsely claimed Pashinyan had aggressive cancer and drew more than 223,000 views before it was debunked. The direction of that campaign is the part the “Russian propaganda” shorthand obscures. By these analysts’ accounts, the operation worked to discredit Pashinyan and lift the opposition, not to aid the government, and it did not change the result: Civil Contract came out ahead. Russia’s interference was real, but it does not explain this election, and it was not the only source of manipulative content: Some came from the contestants themselves. What the record shows is narrower, and harder to look at directly. A government realigning toward the West also had every incentive to recast its domestic opponents as agents of a foreign power, and it did. Senior officials publicly branded the leader of Strong Armenia an employee of the Russian FSB. The state broadcaster carried open bias for the ruling party in violation of its legal mandate. A genuine external threat became cover for an internal consolidation of power. That the threat was real is precisely what made foregrounding it so effective. The post Pashinyan government prosecuted opposition figures before vote appeared first on The Armenian Weekly.