Armenia’s Revolution: A Flickering Light in a Darkening Europe

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CIVIL UNREST ARMENIA TRANSITIONAL GOVERNMENTS

This is the first insurrection in a post-Soviet state that legitimately boiled up from the streets, free of influence from outside forces.

By Marc Cooper DECEMBER 7, 2018

Next Sunday, on December 9, Armenians are expected to further consolidate their unique and vastly underreported “Velvet Revolution.” On that day, acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s “My Step” alliance is expected to win a large governing majority in the country’s parliament.

Though this has been barely reported, if it all, in most of the Western media, for the past seven months, landlocked Armenia, with only 3 million inhabitants, has flickered as a small light of hope and progressive democratic change in a Europe increasingly shadowed by authoritarian and dictatorial forces—especially in most of the former Soviet-bloc states of Eastern Europe.

This is a unique revolution in every sense. It is the first full-on revolution in a post-Soviet state that legitimately boiled up from the streets, free of influence from outside forces—be it NATO, the European Union, the United States, or, for that matter, Armenia’s big-brother ally, Russia. As Anna Ohanyan argues in Foreign Policy, the Armenian revolution has much more in common with the democratic transitions in Latin America in the 1980s than it does with the “color revolutions” in Ukraine and neighboring Georgia that were “driven by reformist elites…usually backed by outside players,” i.e., the EU and the US.

And it sort of came out of the blue. True, for the past decade or so there have been mounting but politically limited protests in Armenia around issues regarding women, the environment, unemployment, and related areas. But what some call a “hybrid regime”—corrupt oligarchic rule clothed in a thin veneer of democracy—kept a tight lid on everything through its primary instrument, the Republican Party.

At the onset of this year, I doubt there were 10 people in Armenia who thought a revolution was only a few months away. As might have been predicted, the uprising was really provoked by the brazen hubris of the oligarchs. Since a not-so-legitimate election in 2008, Republican leader Serzh Sargsyan has served two five-year terms as a highly unpopular president. Before he left office, though, the Republicans engineered a constitutional change transferring executive power from the president to the prime minister. And as soon as Sargsyan’s term was ending, the Republicans nominated him to be prime minister, raising fears that he would be in power for life.

Lifelong political activist Nikol Pashinyan, a modest but highly charismatic 43-year-old journalist—and someone who has done jail time for his activism—didn’t take this sitting down. A member of Parliament and leader of a tiny opposition party with no clear ideology, Pashinyan announced that he would not accept this transfer of power, and on March 31 he set out on a protest march from his hometown toward the capital of Yerevan, 120 miles away. His trek began with just a few followers. Over the 17 days it took him to get to Yerevan, his ranks swelled into the thousands. Then into the tens of thousands. And then, in the middle of the capital, to more than 100,000, as ordinary Armenians nonviolently blockaded the streets and paralyzed the country for several days with what was essentially a general strike.

Faced with with a hopeless situation, Sargsyan resigned on April 23. Shortly thereafter, in what might be called a gust of magical realism, the Republican majority in Parliament named Pashinyan (he is commonly called Nikol) as acting prime minister. This was not an act of generosity or opportunism, but rather of realism. The Republicans knew that it was either bite the bullet or face a modern-day storming of the Bastille.

Pashinyan is the first Armenian leader in modern times who is neither an oligarch nor aligned with oligarchs. He rails against undemocratic rule and social injustice, and he frequently walks the streets dressed in jeans, a baggy sweater, and a dusty cap to talk to whoever is there.

But Pashinyan has been in a precarious situation as acting prime minister. He has no governing majority, and no real political party, and could be deposed with a single no-confidence vote. But he has something more important: truly massive popular support. As Pashinyan navigated his way through Armenia’s byzantine electoral rules to finally get to the snap elections now set for Sunday, he was given two opportunities to flex his stunning political muscle. In late September, when municipal elections were held—the first truly free elections in decades—his slate won more than 80 percent of the vote. A week later, when the Republicans tried to pass a law making the promised snap elections harder to hold, all Pashinyan needed to do was post one Facebook call for mobilization; within an hour, tens of thousands showed up at the doors of Parliament, and the sabotage bill died a quiet death.

Lacking a parliamentary majority during his first half year in office, Pashinyan used executive powers to make what changes he could. Several current and former high-ranking officials were arrested on corruption charges. Some subsidies were given to small farmers. And in the only move that has so far ruffled Moscow’s feathers—albeit slightly—he arrested former president Robert Kocharyan for his role in the killing of 10 people in 2008 protests. Kocharyan has since been released but still faces possible trial.

In any case, the Armenian people got the message that Pashinyan was serious; his popularity, at least for the moment, is enormous. One opinion poll gave him a 98 percent favorability rating. I’ve been to Armenia several time in the past few years, and on every occasion, the collective depression was palpable. But on my last visit, in October, it was the opposite. A visible and tangible wave of optimism, a sense of a future, had washed over the population. And no whiff of militarism or repression has accompanied the revolution. Indeed, there has been expansion, not retraction, of democratic and constitutional norms—in themselves revolutionary in today’s Armenia.