Armenian News Network - Groong: Week In Review Podcast
Armenian News Network - Groong: Week In Review Podcast
2026 Elections: A Mandate Under Dispute | Ep 556, June 7, 2026
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Week in Review - June 7, 2026
In this episode of Groong Week in Review, we analyze the disputed results of Armenia's June 7, 2026 Armenian Parliamentary Election. We examine Civil Contract's contested majority, alleged irregularities and invalid ballots, the OSCE/ODIHR preliminary report, the last-minute exclusion of Prosperous Armenia, opposition arrests and pressure, and what a three-fifths majority could mean for Armenia's courts, institutions, and foreign policy.
Topics:
- Disputed mandate, unresolved majority
- Election-day irregularities in plain sight
- ODIHR's mixed preliminary verdict
- Bribery replaced by state spending
- Opposition's next steps uncertain
Hosts:
Episode 556 | Recorded: Jun 9, 2026
SHOW NOTES: https://podcasts.groong.org/556
#ArmenianElections #ArmenianNews #CivilContract #Pashinyan #Election2026 #SouthCaucasus
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Hello, everyone. Welcome to Groong's Week in Review for June 7, Election Day, 2026. Hello, Hovik. Should I be asking you how you're doing?
Hovik:I pulled all my hair out, as you see.
Asbed:I don't think that's a function of the last two days, though. You know how I always say for people to check our show notes, podcasts.groong.org slash episode number? Well, Hovik has another vector for you to check because we're going to be expanding some of the technology through which you can check out our news and our podcasts eventually. Tell us more, Hovik.
Hovik:Yeah, I'm eager to talk about the elections, or actually I'm not, maybe I'm not eager to talk about the elections, but we have built an app. And the reason we did this is because we find ourselves constantly in recommender jail, essentially. We have a lot of followers. People seem to like our content. But we're not getting surfaced enough and I'm not sure what it is, but we've decided to take matters into our own hands and built a little tool that will help us be seen. It's a very lightweight app. We'll link to the announcement. But you just install it, click the bell icon, and you will get notified whenever we get new episodes. But you can also browse old episodes, browse the show notes, and see who the guests are. And essentially, we're going to expand the feature set in the future. But this is... Our hope and our way of trying to get in front of more eyes and trying to have more content for you. We're also going to have new content types. So we're working on podcast digests so that you will get Get one notification for the week's podcasts and a summary. And if you don't have the time to catch up on all of it, you can just read that one digest article. But the app is it. Please help us break out of jail, our recommender jail, and just install the app. And of course, this is beta. So all we're asking you right now is to test it out. It will have some rough edges, but we will improve it. What's the URL, Hovik? It's app.groong.org, app.groong.org, and give it a try. Under the announcement post that we will publish on our website, there is also a comment section, so you can go ahead and add your feedback there and let us know how to improve it. Let us know what you find. This one essentially is a progressive web app. If you browse to it, you will get a little notification to install it. On Android, it's all automatic. On Apple, you might have to do a little bit more work. You add a shortcut to your home screen, but once you do that, it just behaves like a normal app and it's pretty easy to use.
Asbed:So it's just a test drive thing at this point, folks. We're playing with it. Eventually there will be a real app, but we just wanted to start doing something about the fact that we don't seem to be highly recommended content for a lot of these social media platforms we're not with their program, so let's help ourselves a little bit. App.groong.org. Let's talk a little bit about the elections, our favorite topic du jour. So the June 7, 2026 national parliamentary elections in Armenia concluded amidst a deeply polarized, tense atmosphere that many analysts are calling the most geopoliticized election in the country's Nikol Pashinyan and his ruling Civil Contract party declared a major victory, even when only 11 or 12% of the ballots were counted. The campaign and the voting processes were heavily marked by opposition arrests. Reportedly, almost 700 people were in jail. And by the way, Hovik, I just want to remind you, I know this. I know you know this. This is June 2026. Samvel Karapetyan has been in pretrial detention, house arrest, for 12 months now. There's no date for a trial or anything. He's basically in Pashinyan purgatory. He's not in any kind of a legal process or system or whatever. The man is under permanent house arrest until one day when Pashinyan no longer feels like it.
Hovik:Yeah, so essentially the opposition is trying to campaign with two hands tied behind its back.
Asbed:Yeah, Samvel Karapetyan's entire campaign was run from home because he is not allowed to leave.
Hovik:And when he was in jail, it was not run from anywhere. I mean, it was run by his people, but it's one thing when you run a campaign, it's another when you are in jail and you're limited.
Asbed:Anyway, hundreds of opposition-minded people in jail, aggressive legal crackdowns, allegations of foreign interference, I mean, where do I even start telling you about foreign interference? Hybrid wars, blah, blah, blah. But hey,
Hovik:if you believe Macron, this was democratic heaven, the elections, and Armenia is democratic heaven.
Asbed:Yeah. So Civil Contract got reportedly, at this point, 49.825%, Strong Armenia 23.281%, Armenia Alliance 9.934%. Why do we need three digits, Hovik?
Hovik:Well, because Prosperous Armenia, the third opposition party, was reported on the CEC website to have gotten exactly 4% of the vote, which meant they would enter parliament and Civil Contract would have less mandates. Then, at the last minute, that percentage dropped to 3.996. That's about 60 votes shy of the 4% needed, and it was a surprise because all night it said, with all votes counted, it was at 4%. Then suddenly in the morning it became 3.996, and if this number holds, then it means that PAP, the Prosperous Armenia Party, will not enter Parliament, and what's even worse, Pashinyan will have a [inaudible]. Yeah.
Asbed:So before we talk about the effect of having some kind of a majority at the two-thirds or three-fifths level, Hovik, I also want to mention we are talking about a shortfall. Well, I'm not even going to call it a shortfall because at night there were enough votes for Prosperous Armenia to make it into parliament. In the morning there were about 50, 60 votes shy. And yet, very unusually, this election had over 17,000 invalidated ballots.
Hovik:Yeah, and compare that with 2021 when there were only 4,000 invalid ballots.
Asbed:Right, so 17,000 invalid ballots and suddenly we have 50 ballots, which are 50 votes, which are getting in the way of a party making it into parliament. What do you make of that one? Well, of course, all of the parties have demanded recounts. And I'm not entirely sure where we're going right now. I'm still waiting for a little bit of news as to how the CEC is going to proceed. But the CEC, of course, is run by a long-time crony of Pashinyan's. So I'm not sure what we're going to expect from it.
Hovik:I mean, the entire political field, whether it's the elections, whether it's the law enforcement, whether it's the judiciary right now is controlled by Pashinyan. But let's go a little bit more. The precincts where recounts will happen have been announced. The CEC announced them. It's less than 100, and there are 2,005 or 2,006 precincts, so they won't be doing a recount in all precincts. I don't know the formula or how they do it. Sometimes it's the parties requesting a recount, other times it's the CEC that is initiating the recount.
Hovik: And just one example:in one of the precincts, Prosperous Armenia had received 72
Hovik:votes, but in the final report, whoever was completing that report said that they had received one vote. So just from that one precinct alone, they could recover all of the votes. But I'm pretty sure what's going to happen is that Civil Contract, I mean the CEC, will also challenge or force recounts in precincts where Prosperous Armenia did well in hopes of trying to reduce their numbers. So it's going to be a big game. There is a reason to hope that Prosperous Armenia will eventually make it into the parliament, but I'm pretty sure that the ruling regime will do everything possible to not have that happen.
Asbed:So what were your general impressions of the election itself? And I'm talking about, you know, we had 19 parties and alliances on the ballot, which is far too many. If you ask me, people's eyes will glaze over looking at that and deciding who's who. And they'll probably know one, two or three. And now that we have a situation where one party may be out given a few dozen votes or something like that, why is it that a number of parties that were constantly polling at the quarter percent, half percent, one percent, why don't these people just move out of the way and join forces with somebody else or endorse somebody else and say, hey, we just need like three, four, five parties on the ballot. We don't need 19. I mean, what's the mentality of this, Hovik?
Hovik:I think many of the parties are essentially proxies of Pashinyan, so they had initially no hope, but it's a way to dilute the essentially pocket opposition. So they were given carte blanche to campaign against Pashinyan, say, you know, he's not the right guy, we will run the country better and maybe some people who were disillusioned with Pashinyan will vote for these alternative parties and not the opposition but in reality, overall, this is called vaporization of votes essentially Overall, about 12 to 13% of the entire vote was vaporized this way. What this means is that if these parties don't clear the threshold, then the mandates that they were supposed to get are allocated to the rest of the parties that do clear the threshold in a proportional manner. So Civil Contract would get most of those mandates. So it helps Civil Contract when there are a lot of parties that don't clear the threshold. But what's surprising is that there are several small opposition parties. Arman Tatoyan, I'm looking at you. Yes, I blame you and I blame DOK. And I have... Vardan Ghukasyan. Vardan Ghukasyan. They were always polling in the two percent and yes you can say it's your right to in a democracy compete in elections but given the existential nature of these elections you should have done everything to team up with one of the other alliances and if not then give your votes tell your voters to vote for someone else instead you chose the selfish path I'm hoping it's not out of malice I'm hoping it's out of ego and selfishness, but in any case, Nikol Pashinyan should be thanking you personally for the extra advantage he got. So my impression overall was that there was a lot of manipulation even before these elections. I mean, it was guaranteed that Pashinyan would have some administrative resources, but he did everything to jail his opponents. Every crooked trick in the book was used to minimize the opposition's chances of even normally campaigning. If you take out the head of the campaign offices in various regions if you jail hundreds of your opposition members the ones who are most motivated, the ones who are able to get out the vote, then what do you expect? So I'm also not ruling out the Central Election Commission play tricks because we see when you see a party getting 72 votes and then suddenly in their final tally they are shown to get one vote Those speak louder than any Pashinyan claim. I don't know what else I can say. I was up all night. I was following. I'm extremely disillusioned. Not that I hoped that this electoral process was fair, but I had the hope that if there was enough turnout and all the polls were showing that, if there was sufficient turnout, then It would make it very difficult for Pashinyan to rig these elections. And many pollsters, many analysts had concluded that that magic number was 1.4 million. And I think more than 1.4 million participated. So this was one of the higher turnout elections in Armenian history.
Asbed:Something like 59.5% or something like that turned out, I think.
Hovik:And I think the highest that there ever has been is 63%, which was in 2001, I want to say. Previously, people said, well, they criticized the opposition for not getting people to vote, to mobilize. a lot of people mobilized also the opposition share of that vaporized vote was relatively small as much as I blame Tatoyan and DOK for the extra you know it was 4% out of the 12 that was vaporized. Those 4% could have gone to Gagik Tsarukyan. Those 4% could have gone to Armenia Alliance, and instead of Pashinyan now like being on the verge of having a three-fifths majority, he could be well below that. And, you know, so we would not have the situation. I mean, it just shows to me that this system, where you have this stable majority system where whoever gets the highest percentage even if it's less than 50% they automatically get 50% plus 2% so they get a stable majority and this system of maybe the system not this this culture of allowing so many political parties Maybe it's because of lack of political literacy. Maybe there could be something to regulate this field more so that you have to put more money down in order to register to vote. I'm not sure. But in reality, we're talking about Minor enhancements to a very rigged system. The system stinks from the head and Pashinyan holds all the cards. My hope, maybe I was again naive, was that a strong turnout would make it difficult for Pashinyan to lead the country. Now we have someone who has handed over Artsakh, has lost wars, has capitulated left and right,
Asbed:Of those things that you mentioned, of course, those are extremely important issues for Armenians. The loss of Artsakh is paramount in both of our minds. But on a more technical basis, Hovik, he has not kept any of his promises on which he ran in 2021.
Hovik:He promised the liberation of Shushi and Hadrut.
Asbed:That's right. None of that has happened. In fact,
Asbed: exactly the opposite:complete de-Armenification of Artsakh,
Asbed:complete ethnic cleansing of Artsakh. And this vote, I believe, is certainly not free and fair. We can talk a little bit more about that and the international reactions to this election. Because a lot of European leaders have congratulated Pashinyan, but there are glaring omissions as well. I haven't seen anything from China. I haven't seen anything from Putin and Russia. I've not seen anything from Trump himself, as a matter of fact. I know Marco Rubio has congratulated Pashinyan, but certainly not Trump. I'm not sure what Trump is waiting for, maybe.
Hovik:The Russian Foreign Ministry has criticized it.
Asbed:Oh yeah, heavily. Heavily. Beyond our impressions, certainly the opposition has initiated recount demands. I believe that Robert Kocharyan has demanded a recount, Narek Karapetyan has demanded a recount, and Gagik Tsarukyan has demanded a recount. I'm not entirely sure what the process is at this point. Once again, what do you think? Do they recount 1.4 million ballots?
Hovik:No, only specific precincts. Only specific precincts. The way it works is just like When they were counting the ballots by hand during the election, each party has their own representative that takes part in the process. They just get the ballots out and recount. But what's[inaudible] You can't prove that the ballot was somehow damaged or if it was caused by the election administrator. I was watching the original account live and the chairman of the precinct Where the votes were being counted, because one of the ballots was folded, he wanted to invalidate that ballot, not knowing even the rules, and they had to protest, and he called his boss, and only after that, he said, oh, okay, it's valid.
Asbed:And there are 17,000 invalid ballots, a very large number, once again. Hopefully the recounts are going to take into account those ballots.
Hovik:I think that even if they had 50,000 invalid, even if they forged 50,000 invalid ballots, it's clear that a lot of people still voted for Pashinyan. Now, Armenia, and this is what I was trying to argue with you, I think, and another one of our friends, is that Armenia is is not entirely like Western style in terms of democracy there are still like in the regions especially there is a clan mentality people vote with whatever their village elder says if you have family members who are part of the government then you vote for the government so that your family member can stay employed or your extended family member I think that is also country-wide. So the administrative resource extends beyond the family and I'm not ruling out bribes as well but we see that everyone in the opposition is being wiretapped so if there's any even mildly incriminating evidence that they're like you're talking about well you know payment or whatever they have arrested all the opposition but the the videos and recordings I mean the audio recordings of Pashinyan supporters saying that hey we've been told that all of our school staff bring your children bring your students we need to attend Pashinyan's protests they're not even initiating investigations on that so No one seems to care. Western observers are going to rubber stamp this election. Well,
Asbed:we can talk a little bit about one or two of them a little bit later, because I think they do note with absolutely no consequence. It's like a side note that they mentioned that there was an uneven playing field. But, you know, then it goes to the politicians and the politicians have already spoken before reading the document. Basically, they they spoke. When Pashinyan declared victory, at 11 or 12% of the ballots counted, and at 1 a.m., some leaders were already saying, congratulations. It was at that level rather than anything fact-based where, hey, this guy won or did not win. Basically, 11% of the ballots have been counted. Pashinyan says, I won, and somebody says, congratulations.
Hovik:Kobachidze from Georgia. We should talk to Archil and figure out what's up, because that is very, very weird.
Asbed:That's right. That's the issue with the vote recount demands. Pashinyan ran a campaign hoping that he was going to get a supermajority. He explicitly said a couple of things that he wanted no opposition presence in the parliament. Not a percentage, not a small percentage. He wanted none. And he wanted supermajority. Basically, I'm not sure what the number is. 66.7. Yeah, percentage-wise, two-thirds exactly. Well, it doesn't look like he got that. Right now, there's a little bit of an issue trying to kick Prosperous Armenia out because the reapportionment of the mandates that would go to Prosperous Armenia would get distributed in a way that would give Civil Contract three-fifths. And that's also another milestone. Let's talk a little bit about that, Hovik. What does he get at three-fifths and what does he get at two-thirds?
Hovik:Yeah. So, well, the minimum majority which is guaranteed to the winner is 52%. That means you can form a government, elect a prime minister with just 52% of the vote, pass ordinary laws, approve the state budget. Now if you have a three-fifths majority, which is 60%, you can actually adopt and amend constitutional laws So not the Constitution itself, but constitutional laws, which has one level above a regular law. You can elect independent officials. You can elect the entire judiciary, essentially. So if Pashinyan gets three-fifths, he will be able to continue appointing constitutional court judges, ensuring that all of the judges toe the line, including the human rights defender.
Asbed:Let me mention, the current judiciary is completely packed with handpicked Pashinyan supporters. They're all completely packed and I'm using somewhat U.S. language about packing the courts and stuff like that. But what this means also here is that he can continue doing that with absolutely no oversight or pushback from the opposition in parliament because they will not have enough votes.
Hovik:Yeah. And that's the only hope I think that the opposition can have right now is that they can somehow muster enough votes out of this recount process to get Gagik's vote count back in and then have all of them stay faithful to their party because we know Pashinyan also likes to flip people so if that happens then they will be able to present a challenge to Pashinyan in terms of unilaterally appointing members now once you go beyond the three-fifths majority there is also the two-thirds majority which is the constitutional majority I mean the only honestly I'm not sure maybe I'm not a legal expert the only thing that this will allow you to do is to unilaterally amend parts of the Constitution. Now, not the entire Constitution can be amended by the Parliament. Some parts of the Constitution must be amended by referendum, but the parts that can be, and they're specified in the Constitution, which clauses can be amended, as long as they can be amended by Parliament, then all you need to have is two-thirds majority, and you will be able to amend it.
Asbed:And this three-fifths is currently hinging on that fake story about 60 ballots or 77 ballots that are preventing Prosperous Armenia from getting into Parliament. Once again, while 17,000 ballots are invalidated for yet unknown reasons. And that's a very, very high number. Once again, I know Hovik said it, I think in 2021 and before that, let's say the invalid ballot count on much lower turnout was between two and four thousand ballots.
Hovik:What other falsifications were there? I mean, we're just talking about Election Day, you know, we've covered And it's really, it can't be overstated that Pashinyan has done everything to rig the game before the elections. But during election day itself, we saw hundreds of opposition members being arrested. Well, in and of itself, that means 100 people can't go and vote. So even then, you know, those people could have been voting for Prosperous Armenia. We saw the machinations for Prosperous Armenia that I already said, just for precincts alone, like I think they were able to identify more than 100 votes that were misrepresented. And then there's this thing, I don't know if you heard about this, but there's this thing called secret voter lists.
Asbed:I don't know much about that.
Hovik:The official number reported by the CEC for the voters was 2,485,581. Then suddenly, so I was using my spreadsheets and everything when I was doing calculation, I was using that number. And then when the results came out, they said that Armenia had 2,507,216 voters. That's a difference of 21,000. And when you ask them, the media asked the CEC, they said, who are those extra 21,000? Why weren't they included before? It was just non-answers, no comments, you know, all the people who we said had the right to vote. So it was very evasive. One can assume that these are, I don't know, secret government employees, but even if they were, why wouldn't you disclose that number first rather than saying there are 2,485,581 before the elections and then after that saying, oh, well, actually there's 2,507,000.
Asbed:I haven't done my math yet, Hovik, but in a country of 3 million, I'm just being very rough, if 22% are under the voting age, what's the number approximately?
Hovik:I think it was around 2,300,000. But I think that there is a difference between doing that calculation and the number of people holding Armenian passports, meaning still being citizens of Armenia, but residing outside of Armenia. So yes, the population of Armenia is 3 million, but there's also, let's say 200,000 or 300,000 citizens of Armenia who are considered citizens of Armenia, but have been outside of Armenia for a long time. One is the immigration database and the other is the actual citizenship database, which may be different. I don't know. I think that there's always this tendency to say, well, there aren't that many people in Armenia. I don't buy that. I think that Armenia's total population is 3 million, and I don't think that In general, they would falsify the total number of eligible voters, except in this case, when suddenly the total number of voters was inflated. And I don't know what it means, but it was just... Yeah,
Asbed:and I don't know exactly to what end, to be honest. I'm not entirely sure. The total number, whether we decide it's 2.48 or 2.501, whatever, it seems a little high to me. But more importantly, we are talking about Two, three hundred thousand citizens of Armenia who reside in Russia. And there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands here in Los Angeles and well, the United States in general. These people were not allowed to vote. They were not given any means. If you want to get a ticket and go to Armenia and vote, you are probably going to be allowed to do that. But they were not allowed to vote from abroad. And even though Pashinyan had said 65% of the Armenian citizens in Russia will vote for Civil Contract, he prevented them. I would love to know why. because the infrastructure for them to vote was there. There was a separate breakout of approximately, working from the top of my head, 537 digital votes online voting and supposedly 300 of them went to Civil Contract. I can believe that because they probably allowed diplomats to vote from abroad.
Hovik:So that system is probably in place for diplomats, but not for regular citizens.
Asbed:Listen, there's a right to vote for citizens. There's a right to vote. This is not a privilege to vote. It's a right to vote. Therefore, this government is failing to allow citizens of Armenia to vote.
Hovik:Well, of course. I mean, when we saw...
Asbed:It's not like a driver's license where you're privileged to have a driver's license. It's a right that your voice must be heard.
Hovik:Yeah. Well, during Kocharyan's time, Armenian citizens abroad were allowed to vote, but I don't know when that law was changed, but I'm pretty sure even if it was changed before Pashinyan, he's not too thrilled about allowing Diasporans to vote. Let me just put it that way.
Asbed:Yeah. So that's hundreds of thousands of people who were disenfranchised and did not vote. He believes 65% of them would have voted for him. It's not clear that that's true, but we will not know in the next few days.
Hovik:Anyway, the other major irregularity, I mean, it's all like on camera, right? All the precincts are supposed to close at 8 p.m.. And the rule is that if there's anyone inside the precinct, They are still allowed to stay there and vote. But if you're outside the door of the precinct, then you're not allowed to vote. That's it.
Hovik: And we saw as late as 11:30 or even after that until midnight,
Hovik:we saw army soldiers coming in to vote so they drove them in battalions to vote and just like law enforcement you know in the army it's very well known fact that if your commander tells you you know what a certain way I mean yeah maybe some if you have if your opinion that you might have your own decision but young kids uh young impressionable boys 18 year old 20 year old probably would not risk doing that. We talked a little bit about the OSCE/ODIHR report. I don't know if we should go too much into it. All I can say is, yes, they played lip service to saying, oh, there was a lot of, what do they call it, severe structural pressure and an unequal playing field. But in the end, I said it couldn't affect the outcome of the elections. So yes.
Asbed:Which I simply do not understand. When we are talking about 50 to 75 ballots making a difference, how could it not affect the outcome of the elections? So there was, for me, and I went through this report very quickly, it was a lot of Euro-speak. Like you said, you know they said basically the mechanics were beautiful there were some pressures some administrative things inside the playing field was not fair so you really have to understand what they're saying to understand it you know read between the lines things were not great yeah but but then you know just like any kind of a Euro document it's going to go to the politicians and the politicians had already congratulated I posted them on on groong There was something on the order of about 35 to 40 of them. Probably every person from all 28 countries in the EU congratulated overnight and the next day that Pashinyan had won. So the political verdict was out before the report was in.
Hovik:Yeah, it'd be interesting to talk to Haray Balian, who used to be, actually, he used to run elections, OSCE/ODIHR, and we asked him point blank. We said, like, well, is the report about free and fair Well,
Asbed:meanwhile, when we talked to Member of Parliament, Arthur Khachadrian, he said, I know how your stuff is written because he knows that they are pre-written or some conclusions are already, you know, there's a nice format, a template within which your report is made.
Hovik:Let's move on, because we knew already that the OSCE/ODIHR is not going to worry about Pashinyan's forgeries.
Asbed:Let me add one thing, Hovik. I believe it was almost the same thing with the IRI, the International Republican Institute. Their report is also out. I don't have it handy. I kind of scanned it real fast, but they were even more vehement. They said basically it's a free and fair election. Everything was great. So they're done.
Hovik:Well, I hope they have, if Pashinyan's democracy is free and fair, I wish it on their countries. I really hope they have that kind of democracy in their countries. Now, the Pashinyan administration or the Pashinyan regime has accused all of its critics, all of the opposition for briberies, right? But I want to talk about just how much legalized bribery Pashinyan has used for this election. If you're a listener of this podcast, you might know the tricks, you know, the incident where, for instance, the Civil Contract Party had received multimillion-dram donations, millions of dollars in donations from anonymous sources, which somehow the Armenian law allows, and so much for transparency and democracy under Pashinyan. And these come from big businesses who are either seeking favors from the government in terms of handouts or less inspection and less scrutiny, right? But for this election in the last six months, Pashinyan has spent a huge amount of money from the state budget itself to ensure his victory up to a billion dollars over the last six months and a billion dollars in recurring expenses. How you might ask? Well, I'll tell you. So prior to January, the opposition was trying to get an increase in the pensions of the elderly. And no matter what they did, the Pashinyan regime said, oh, we don't have the money, it's not in our budget. Then right after January, even though there is no money budgeted for it, they somehow found the money to increase the pensions of Armenian elderly and we're an old population, actually so 660,000 pensioners and if you multiply that by 10,000 dram that's about 75 billion dram per year or 220 million dollars per year that is not budgeted so somehow from somewhere in the state revenues they found the money whether it was by raising getting new loans Now for this insurance, just for this election in the last six months, they also enacted a health insurance reform, which was done in haste. Many people criticize it because it's not what it's made out to be. All the doctors are being screwed left and right, but That insurance rollout itself and the continuing yearly recurring expenses are going to be $600 million. I'm not talking about all the sudden urge to rebuild all the roads in Armenia, even the working ones. I'm not talking about the huge expense in terms of buses in Yerevan, which also happened. So all of that happened and it adds up to more than a billion dollars. Unfortunately, it's legal bribery. It's legalized bribery of the citizens. Can I also mention a couple more things?
Asbed:In the last month, the European political community and the EU-Armenia summit Meetings were held in Yerevan. All of those things cost a huge amount of construction because Pashinyan was trying to make Yerevan look good to the Europeans, look like a European city. Those constructions disrupted the city extensively. People were really furious at the government. And all of those meetings were not cheap. I don't know exactly how much they cost, but basically both of those meetings ended up being Civil Contract campaigns for their election. They didn't pay for it. That came out of the government budgets. And then these people have the gall to say that the genocide commemorations are a Dashnaktsakan campaign and the Dashnaktsakan should pay for the genocide commemoration on April 24th.
Hovik:Yeah. Anyway, so in summary, I think we can say that these elections were not fair, for sure. And I think they're also not free because they deprived a lot of people from their freedom to vote. Whether it's in the military by compelling the soldiers to vote in a certain way or whether it's through arrests and stopping people from voting. So I don't see any basis for calling these elections free and fair and the foreign influence is unthinkable and it's unimaginable how much foreign influence specifically from the West and the EU and the US.
Asbed:Free and fair or what? Now, on our show, we talk ad nauseum about these issues. So I don't want to rehash everything. Maybe we'll just put things almost verbatim as we have it for ourselves in the show notes for people to see. But no, I don't think that it was a fair playing field. Samvel Karapetyan has basically spent the entire cycle under house arrest or pretrial detention. This whole government's anti-corruption campaign has been weaponized with mass pre-election arrests. And you mentioned the surveillance and the recordings and the wiretapping of people. In addition to that, the use of whatever they They leak it to the public. And so your privacy is invaded. You have absolutely no say about what goes in. There's no accountability on the use of that data.
Hovik:And they sometimes edit it out of context as well.
Asbed:Completely out of context. Sometimes it's found to be fabricated even. So by the time people decide, is this real information or is this fabricated information, the damage has been done already. And I think that this was also mentioned by Rafi Kalfayan when he was on our show. This stuff is damaging and this is a government that is using the methods of yellow journalism and internet influencers, trolls, to achieve results, extralegal results.
Hovik:In reality, if you're a patriot, if you're an Armenian patriot, if you're in the Armenian opposition, then you have almost the entire might of the world's most powerful countries and their intelligence services working against you whether it's through shaping public opinion your neighbor's opinion or whether it's also helping Pashinyan wiretap his opponents I would say that also goes into it so it was a rigged playing field and my question is what are the opposition's next steps because they have a few choices some have argued that They should lay down their mandates and not participate in this charade and others have said, well, you know, I think some of the He hinted that they're waiting to see if the PAP gets in and if Pashinyan has a three-fifths majority, which leads me to believe that if they somehow are able to get into parliament without a three-fifths majority for Civil Contract, then they will keep their mandates. I'm not sure which choice is the best. What are your thoughts about it?
Asbed:Well, I'm very conflicted. It's very easy to look back on 2021 and say, well, they shouldn't have gotten into a rigged parliament. And this is a similar situation to that. It's very dangerous to lay down your mandate and say, we're not going in, because you don't know if there's going to be some kind of a snap election called and Pashinyan just you know railroads the the real opposition and brings in other so-called opposition parties like the the Republic Party and the Meritocratic Armenia Party and these
Hovik:guys they can't bring in they have to bring in two parties no they uh so they if you if if the so laying down the mandates is done at the individual level at the um and not at the party level and they can't replace it with another party. What they can do, what has to happen, and I'm not sure if it's feasible, is let's say Strong Armenia has- Remember I was talking about a snap election.
Asbed:Like he basically invalidates the election, calls for a new election and does not allow these people to participate. Basically bans them, which we were very concerned about a ban on some of these parties like Strong Armenia.
Hovik:Yeah, he might try for that, but that would probably look even worse. Maybe he refrained from doing that because of this. But honestly, I have this argument about laying down mandates. I don't know how feasible it is, because if you have 230 people on your list, Somewhere at the bottom of the list, there might be someone who says, you know what, I'm not laying down my mandate. You know, I like the 2 million dram salary. And yes, even though I agree, I mean, I'm sure that the ones at the bottom of those lists are less vetted than the ones at the top. So I'm not sure how committed they are to the parties and how much compromise they have on them by Pashinyan. So it's so essentially it's not the party's decision. It's the individual. They have a list. It's sequential. So if number one on the list declines their mandate, then they go to number two and they go to number three. But even even more than that, if the opposition collectively decides to not go into Parliament, I would like to see what they do on the street, because if there is no plan for the street and if they're going to be sequestered and ghettoized, and always picked on, then I don't know why they would do that.
Asbed:I don't know how you feel, so I'm going to ask you, because I am not seeing any real ground being prepared for street action protests or anything like that. Honestly, there would be some evidence that they are going to take to the street and protest the current situation. You can't say that that's what we're going to do, from the ground up spontaneously. It takes preparation. I'm not seeing that. Are you? Yeah.
Hovik:And I think I'm not seeing it. We've been critical of this as well. They should have prepared the street much earlier. Months ago. So if there's any criticism for the opposition, I think it's valid to criticize them. But also, you know, I'm not going to pick on someone who's down right now, and the opposition has Now they have to come up with a unified action plan on what to do. And it's going to be a very tough three-way negotiation between the three parties who have very you know macho leaders so we'll see how it goes but I hope they come to an agreement and whether it's street action boycott you know or going into Parliament they have to have a plan on why they're doing it and I would like to see a plan what are you going to do there what are your red lines and I would like to make sure that they don't have any MPs who can be flipped by Pashinyan.
Asbed:I have one message to them. Put Armenia first. Put Armenia first before party or egos or leaders or whatever. Just the first interest is Armenia's interest. Okay. Well, we've ragged and ranted enough about the elections. So maybe we should be done for this week. What do you think?
Hovik:I would be more than happy to have less.
Asbed:It's demoralizing and I know a lot of people, especially in the diaspora, more in tune with the diaspora, I know a lot of people feel deeply disappointed in things that are going on in the future. It doesn't look so bright at the moment, but hang in there as good Armenians and get back on your feet and stand up for your values.
Hovik:Yeah, and we might record an episode actually later this week with Hrant. And with him, I want to actually discuss these discrepancies in the polling because none of the polls were accurate. And some, you know, I might claim to be more accurate than others, but in reality, it shows that something is causing people to respond to different polls differently. And we'll try to see if we can analyze that.
Asbed:We'd like to understand the sociology of that, really. Why are polls the way they are when the vote just does not reflect exactly what we're seeing?
Hovik:Let's wait to see what the opposition also has to do so the next few days are going to be critical for the opposition but I hope they actually improve also in their strategic communication and let people know what their plans are so that they can this feeling of rage and betrayal doesn't dominate and they can transform it into an action, a street action. Anyway, thank you for watching, folks. Don't forget to install our app, app.groong.org.
Asbed:At the least, go and check it out. Test drive. I mean, it's not a lot, but just kind of click around and see how it feels. And we would appreciate any kind of feedback, even feature requests, because we're at an early point. Okay.
Hovik:All right.
Asbed:I'm Hovik Manucharyan, I'm Asbed Bedrossian, and we'll talk to you next week. Bye bye.
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