The air in Yerevan at dawn smells of wet asphalt and freshly baked lavash, a flatbread that has tasted the same through empires, republics, and wars. But on this Monday morning, the city feels different. People walk a little slower past the Soviet-era stone facades of Republic Square. They glance at their phones, checking the numbers that trickled in through the night.
By sunrise, the verdict was clear. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan held onto power. His Civil Contract party secured 49.9 percent of the vote, locking in a projected 61 out of 105 parliamentary seats. Also making news in related news: Inside the Iran Nuclear Crisis Nobody is Talking About.
To the outside world, this is a data point. It is a headline about a small South Caucasus nation choosing Brussels over Moscow. But if you sit at a wooden table in a Yerevan courtyard, the geopolitical abstraction vanishes. It is replaced by a heavy, human anxiety.
Consider Anahit. She is sixty-six, a retired engineer with silver hair and hands that spent decades drafting the infrastructure of a country that no longer exists. She voted against Pashinyan. For her, the grand speeches about European integration do not warm a kitchen. More information regarding the matter are detailed by The Washington Post.
"We get gas at 177 dollars from Russia," she says, her fingers tapping against a porcelain teacup. To Anahit, the Kremlin is not an ideology. It is a utility provider. It is the reason her pension stretches far enough to buy winter heat. She looks toward the West with profound skepticism, unconvinced that distant promises from Brussels will materialize when the cold sets in.
A few blocks away, Lilit Mkrtchyan sees a completely different horizon. She runs a small shop filled with dried fruits and spices, her days defined by the rhythmic chime of the doorbell. For Lilit, the status quo was a slow suffocation. She speaks of her son, a young man whose future has been shadowed by the constant threat of mobilization.
"Armenians are tired of war," Lilit says. Her voice drops, carrying the weight of thousands of mothers who watched the disastrous conflicts with Azerbaijan in 2020 and 2023. Those wars ended in devastating territorial losses and the sudden, traumatic displacement of over 100,000 ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. "We want to be an open, European country where I don't have to worry that my son will be called up to fight."
The Shadow of the Guarantor
To understand why this election feels like a collective breath-holding exercise, you have to understand the deep betrayal that preceded it. For decades, Armenia operated under an unwritten rule: Moscow was the shield. If the borders were threatened, the Kremlin would step in.
But when the rockets fell during successive crises, the shield stayed down. Russia, bogged down in its own campaign in Ukraine, looked the other way. The realization was bitter, sudden, and absolute. The security guarantee was an illusion.
Pashinyan, a former journalist who originally rose to power on the back of the 2018 Velvet Revolution, capitalized on this sting. He began systematically uncoupling Armenia from its old anchor. He froze participation in the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization. He ordered Russian border guards to pack up and leave Yerevan’s main airport. He even traveled to host Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking in English rather than the traditional Russian tongue of post-Soviet diplomacy.
But breaking up with a superpower is a messy, perilous affair.
The Kremlin did not watch quietly. Ahead of Sunday's vote, Russian officials launched a barrage of economic restrictions, targeting Armenian agricultural exports. Thinly veiled warnings came from Moscow, explicitly drawing parallels between Armenia's new trajectory and the path taken by Ukraine.
The opposition rallied around Samvel Karapetyan, a billionaire who amassed his fortune in the Russian construction sector. His message to the electorate was simple: Pashinyan is playing a game the country cannot afford to lose. Karapetyan argued that alienating Moscow was putting a small, vulnerable nation in existential danger. His campaign, however, was waged under extraordinary circumstances—he spent it under house arrest, facing charges of allegedly calling for the violent overthrow of the constitutional order.
The Concept of a Real Armenia
Pashinyan’s victory is not a mandate of unalloyed joy. It is a pragmatic choice born of exhaustion. Commentators in Yerevan describe the mood as a calculation of the lesser of two evils. The alternative—returning to the orbit of oligarchs and absolute Kremlin dependency—felt to many like stepping backward into a cage.
Yet, the road ahead is fraught with compromise. Pashinyan has introduced a doctrine he calls "Real Armenia." It is an intentional, painful pivot away from what he describes as a historical obsession with lost lands and ancient grievances. To build a future, he argues, Armenia must make a hard, permanent peace with Azerbaijan and normalize relations with Turkey.
The rewards are tangible: open borders, revived trade routes, and an influx of European investment. The European Commission has already pledged an initial 50-million-euro support package to help cushion the country against Russian economic retaliation.
But the concessions cut deep into the national psyche. Because Pashinyan’s party fell short of a two-thirds constitutional majority, he cannot easily push through the legislative changes required for a final peace treaty without facing a referendum. The political landscape remains deeply fractured. The trauma of the refugees who fled Nagorno-Karabakh lingers in the capital, a living reminder of what has already been surrendered.
On election day, Pashinyan attempted to walk a tightrope, reassuring critics that there was no immediate question of completely severing ties with Russia. The country remains part of the Eurasian Economic Union. The Russian military base in Gyumri still stands. The economic gravity of Moscow cannot be wiped out by a single ballot.
Outside Lilit’s shop, the city moves into the afternoon. A group of students argues quietly over coffee, their voices mixing with the ambient hum of traffic. They are talking about visas, European universities, and the price of apartments.
An old world is cracking open in the Caucasus, and a new one is being built on the fly, block by painful block. The people have voted for an exit from the past, but everyone in Yerevan knows that looking toward the West does not make the East disappear.
