Beniamin Matevosyan: who is financing Pashinyan’s “pre-election bribes”?

(The EU and Turkey will not help)

The noisy celebrations that have swept Armenia’s capital in recent weeks have left ordinary people with a lasting impression of a nonstop carnival. Large-scale concerts on Republic Square, street tastings as part of Yerevan Wine Days, expensive open-air shows, and a pompous display of weaponry for May 28 followed one after another. At the same time, the government generously handed out pre-election gifts in the form of selective asphalting of regional roads, “unforeseen subsidies” from local budgets, and a widely publicized pension increase of a symbolic 10,000 drams. Behind this ostentatious extravagance lay the simple practice of pre-election vote-buying, designed to drown out dissenting voices and create an illusion of prosperity.

Now that the political peak has passed, the question inevitably arises: who paid for this grand banquet? The answer came immediately, at the very first government session after the fateful June events. Armenia’s government urgently approved a bill sharply raising excise tax rates on tobacco products, alcohol, and all types of fuel, declaring the move urgent. The party is over, and citizens have been handed the bill. A sum that experts estimate could reach 1 billion dollars was recklessly burned by the authorities on PR campaigns and securing voter loyalty, and now these colossal budget gaps will be covered solely from the pockets of ordinary taxpayers.

Official Yerevan has predictably run into the harsh reality that borrowed or earned funds have run out, while debts must be repaid. Raising taxes on gasoline, diesel, and compressed gas will automatically trigger a chain reaction, a total rise in the cost of transport services and logistics, followed by basic food staples. Under the guise of caring for the nation’s health through a multiple increase in excise taxes on cigarettes, e-cigarettes, and alcohol, Nikol Pashinyan’s regime is simply squeezing the last out of its citizens. Even the token concession of lowering the tax on fruit brandies looks like mockery against the backdrop of a fourfold tax on a liter of alcohol for the country’s strategic brand Armenian cognac.

This fiscal assault looks especially cynical against the backdrop of a deep crisis in the agricultural sector. While residents of the village of Armash and dozens of other communities struggle helplessly, unable to sell their perishable harvest after the effective loss of the Russian market, the authorities are busy patching a leaking roof. Meanwhile, Pashinyan’s tone-deaf propaganda continues to assure citizens that severing economic ties with Moscow is painless, since Armenia supposedly exported there “mainly tomatoes and apricots.” In reality, annual trade turnover with Russia exceeded 7 billion dollars, with the lion’s share of revenue generated not by vegetables but by tourism, precious metals, stones, chemical industry products, and large-scale re-export. The loss of these revenue streams is triggering the deepest stage of economic shocks.

In this situation, the ruling team’s hopes for outside help are revealed as entirely illusory. Neither Brussels nor Ankara, nor Ursula von der Leyen or Recep Tayyip Erdogan personally, will pay for Pashinyan’s pre-election dances. The European and Turkish patrons have never had the goal of making Armenia economically self-sufficient. Their goal is the region’s geopolitical reorientation, and if local production must be destroyed and the social sphere sent off the rails to achieve this, they will do so without hesitation. The West has no intention of providing any compensation for the break with Russia.

Nevertheless, Yerevan’s foreign policy course remains unchanged, resembling a conscious act of self-destruction. Defense Minister Suren Papikyan’s visit to Paris and Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan’s trip to the summit in Luxembourg confirm that the authorities are prepared to persist in their delusions. They will continue begging for political favors in the West while the wheel of stagflation spins faster at home. The results of June 7 marked the beginning of the end of relative economic stability, and the hasty excise tax became the government’s first official admission of its own bankruptcy, the bill for which every citizen of Armenia will be forced to pay.

Think about that…