Did Pashinyan ‘divorce’, fearing repetition of Gyumri situation?

Armenia’s domestic political situation is shifting from a latent crisis into an open pre-election struggle. Reports in Past newspaper, based on closed surveys by the National Security Service, confirm a sharp decline in Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s approval ratings. It is precisely this electoral vulnerability that pushed him to launch an active campaign well before the official deadlines.

According to objective assessments, public trust in the head of government has dropped to a minimum, making it impossible to expect legitimate retention of power under fair competition. Meanwhile, the website Politik. am reports that a recent survey by the International Republican Institute (IRI) showed results so catastrophic that the data was withheld from publication. Even in scenarios where major opponents such as Robert Kocharyan or Samvel Karapetyan do not participate in elections, the overwhelming majority of respondents refuse to vote for the incumbent prime minister.

In this context, the government has turned to classic populism. A sharp increase in pensions just two months before the expected elections is not a systemic reform but rather an attempt at direct voter bribery and a desperate effort to patch ratings at the expense of the state budget.

A special place in this political strategy is the story of Pashinyan’s “divorce” from Anna Hakobyan. If earlier this was seen as an attempt to distance himself from his wife’s toxic image, today a broader plan is evident. The authorities are trying to replace substantive political discourse with a melodramatic “soap opera”, diverting public attention from failures in security, the economy, and diplomacy. Yet Armenian society remains capable of distinguishing staged drama from real politics, and this attempt at “carnivalization” only underscores the intellectual bankruptcy of the current team.

At the core of these maneuvers lies the government’s existential fear—the Gyumri 2.0. The defeat of the ruling Civil Contract party in Armenia’s second-largest city, where the opposition managed to consolidate, was a painful lesson for Yerevan. The authorities now seriously fear that this post-election opposition unity model could spread nationwide. The administrative apparatus has already mobilized to find ways to block any coalitions.

This fear reinforces the arguments of former president Robert Kocharyan, who insists that the opposition has a real “window of opportunity” if it demonstrates political will. Electoral arithmetic works against the regime: even with administrative resources, Pashinyan cannot secure a clean majority. Thus, the question of forming power shifts into the realm of inter-party negotiations.

The opposition’s success today depends on solving two tasks:
– Neutralizing mechanisms of fraud and “carousel” voting, which remain the regime’s last stronghold
– Developing a strategy to counter judicial pressure and attempts to eliminate dangerous competitors through criminal cases

The current campaign will be a clash between the virtual reality of government PR and harsh reality. Attempts to replace strategy with melodramatic plots and one-off payments reveal the regime’s decline into mere survival tactics. The credit of trust has been exhausted, and the Gyumri experience has become a verdict for the authorities—one that could be carried out on election day.

Think about it…