Senior members of Pashinian’s Civil Contract party have exposed in recent days their fears regarding the ongoing emergence of three major election contenders led by former President Robert Kocharian and two wealthy businessmen, Samvel Karapetian and Gagik Tsarukian.
Kocharian’s opposition Hayastan alliance finished second in Armenia’s last legislative elections held in 2021. The 71-year-old ex-president is currently reshuffling it ahead of the polls scheduled for June 7.
Karapetian decided to enter politics and challenge Pashinian shortly after being arrested last June following his strong criticism of the prime minister’s controversial campaign against the Armenian Apostolic Church. A new opposition group set up by the 60-year-old Russian-Armenian businessman is expected to be one of the ruling party’s main election challengers.
For his part, Tsarukian is cobbling together a new and more broad-based bloc that will be made of up of not only his Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK) but also at least two other opposition parties. One of them, Mayr Hayastan, has the third largest group in Yerevan’s municipal council.
Pashinian declared last Friday that there will be no former presidents and “oligarchs” in the Armenian political arena after the June elections. He did not elaborate.
Senior Civil Contract figures said in the following days that the three opposition groups are intent on unseating Pashinian by collectively winning a majority in the new Armenian parliament and then cutting a power-sharing deal. They said Kocharian, Karapetian and Tsarukian aim to replicate the opposition victory in municipal elections held in Gyumri almost a year ago.
Pashinian’s party won most votes but fell well short of a majority in the local council empowered to appoint the city’s mayor. The mayor was installed by four opposition groups that participated in the elections separately.
For a second time in three days, Ruben Rubinian, a deputy speaker of the Armenian parliament, posted on Wednesday a video message on Facebook warning against a repeat of what happened in Gyumri.
“We must not allow Kocharian, the Russian oligarch, and the local oligarch with pro-Belarusian leanings to decide the fate of our country,” he said.
“You’ll see the back of your heads, you won’t see a Gyumri-2 operation,” Vahagn Aleksanian, another senior lawmaker affiliated with Civil Contract, warned the three opposition camps.
The Pashinian allies did not say just how Armenia’s current leadership will go about preventing its election defeat.
Andranik Tevanian, the Mayr Hayastan leader, scoffed at the warnings. He argued that opposition forces have a legal right to join forces before or after elections with the aim of forming a government.
“Their behavior already suggests they are worried because they understand very well that they will lose the election,” Tevanian said of the authorities. “Now, if they are going to resort to electoral fraud and not allow [regime change] in that way, it means that they want to provoke social unrest and clashes.”
Pashinian was already accused by critics of planning to secure an election victory through fraud or foul play when it emerged in December that his administration requested election-related assistance from the European Union. The EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, revealed that Yerevan is seeking the kind of “help to fight foreign malign interference” which the EU provided to Moldova ahead of parliamentary elections held there in September 2025.
Two Moldovan opposition parties deemed pro-Russian were barred from participating in the elections won by the country’s pro-Western leadership. The EU justified those bans, alleging Russian interference in the Moldovan elections. Armenian opposition groups fear that some of them may likewise be disqualified from the June vote.