Under the Armenian constitution, Karapetian cannot hold the top government post because of his dual Russian citizenship. His nephew and right-hand man, Narek Karapetian, said the Strong Armenia party will move to amend a relevant article of the constitution and remove the legal hurdle if it wins the elections scheduled for June 7.
“We need a majority in the [next] National Assembly,” he said during the party’s founding congress in Yerevan.
Neither he nor other senior party members said who will top the list of Strong Armenia’s election candidates. The constitution also bars Samvel Karapetian from running for the parliament for the same reason.
Strong Armenia is an offshoot of the Mer Dzevov (In Our Way) movement which Karapetian launched in late August two months after being arrested and prosecuted following his strong criticism of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s efforts to depose the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Catholicos Garegin II. The movement claims to have attracted 20,000 members since then. The new party spawned by it is expected to be one of Pashinian’s main election challengers.
In an AI-generated video message to the party congress, Karapetian, who was moved to house arrest in late December, again expressed confidence that the country’s ruling “small clique” will be voted out of office.
“In 115 days, everyone will see that Strong Armenia is not just a party,” he said. “We will definitely succeed, in our own way.”
Born and raised in Armenia, Karapetian has mainly lived Russia since the early 1990s, making there a fortune now estimated by the Forbes magazine at almost $5 billion. He has financed many charity projects in Armenia as well as Nagorno-Karabakh and made lavish donations to the church.
Although Pashinian’s political allies have accused the 60-year-old tycoon of plotting to topple the Armenian government on the Kremlin’s orders, Moscow has refrained from openly calling for his release. Still, the Russian Foreign Ministry signaled on December 16 concerns about his continuing detention. He was granted house arrest two weeks later.
Karapetian’s opposition movement puts the emphasis on economic issues. It says a new government formed by it would create 300,000 jobs within a few years by helping to launch large-scale investment projects and exempting small businesses from all taxes.
The movement has so far been vague on Armenian foreign and security policy favored by it and its positions on the conflict with Azerbaijan or relations with Russia. In his latest statement, Karapetian indicated his disapproval of Pashinian’s unilateral concessions to Azerbaijan.
“No country in the world can negotiate real peace by begging for peace,” he said. “We will strengthen our army and defense by introducing new technologies, developing a modern defense program and implementing it because a strong peace requires a strong and modern army.”