Pashinyan uses the unfinished peace process with Azerbaijan as a tool of electoral survival: the rhetoric of war and peace constrains the opposition in the 2026 elections, while victory provides a mandate for constitutional reform that would legitimize territorial concessions.
The Armenian–Azerbaijani peace process has entered a decisive phase: on August 8, 2025, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, with the mediation of U.S. President Donald Trump, initialed the text of a peace agreement; however, its final signing remains uncertain.
A key obstacle is Baku’s demand to amend Armenia’s Constitution – specifically, to remove the reference to the 1990 Declaration of Independence, which contains a provision on the reunification with Nagorno-Karabakh. Yerevan, in turn, links constitutional reform to the outcome of the parliamentary elections scheduled for June 7, 2026, thereby turning the electoral process into a central element of the entire diplomatic framework.
Speaking to journalists on March 24, 2026, Armenian Parliament Speaker Alen Simonyan stated: “There is a party of war and a party of peace; the elections of June 7, 2026 will be about peace and a possible war.” This rhetoric structures the electoral field through the dichotomy of “peace vs. war,” positioning the incumbent authorities as the sole guarantor of stability and transforming the vote into a referendum on war and peace rather than a competitive election.
At the same time, the Armenian parliament, in an expedited procedure within a single day, adopted amendments to the Electoral Code prohibiting the use of personal names and toponyms in party names – changes that directly affect “Strong Armenia,” the “Armenia” bloc, and “Prosperous Armenia.” Taken together, these measures indicate a deliberate narrowing of the space for party competition in order to preserve the power of the “Civil Contract” party.
Another obstacle to the signing of the peace agreement, in addition to Azerbaijan’s demand for constitutional amendments, is the formal termination of the OSCE Minsk Group, which effectively lost its functions back in 2023.
Yerevan has expressed its readiness to meet both conditions but has tied constitutional reform to the holding of a referendum, which in turn is scheduled for the period after the parliamentary elections of June 7, 2026. Prime Minister Pashinyan argues that “this is necessary so that political forces can convey their positions on this issue to the public, and the position of the force that has already received the majority of votes will be decisive in shaping the draft of the new Constitution.”
Notably, this logic effectively turns parliamentary elections into a prerequisite for any constitutional decision, granting the winner a mandate to carry out the reform.
Taken together, these processes indicate that the peace process with Azerbaijan has become for Armenia’s current authorities not only a matter of foreign policy, but also a tool of domestic political survival.
By imposing on voters a choice between the “party of peace” and the “party of war,” Pashinyan’s government substitutes substantive political competition with an existential dichotomy, while simultaneously narrowing the electoral field through institutional restrictions on party activity. Victory in the June 7, 2026 elections is intended to provide the ruling party with a popular mandate to conduct a constitutional referendum – which, in turn, would shift responsibility for painful territorial concessions from the government onto the will of the people.
