Do we like them?

Do we like Nikol Pashinyan?

Our score: 5 out of 10. A genuine record of standing up to power, set against credible complaints that he now uses power against opponents.

Pashinyan was born in Ijevan in 1975 and studied journalism at Yerevan State University, though he was expelled for his political activities. He ended up editing The Armenian Times, a paper hostile to the Kocharyan and Sargsyan governments. In 2000 he was convicted of defamation and libel against several people, which makes him a journalist who knows what it is to be on the wrong end of a courtroom.

The formative stoush was 2008. After a disputed election, a crackdown on protesters on 1 March left ten people dead, and Pashinyan went into hiding before turning himself in in 2009. He was convicted of organising mass disturbances and released in 2011 under an amnesty, and in April 2022 Armenia's Court of Cassation overturned that conviction after a European Court of Human Rights ruling. In 2018 he led the protests that brought down Serzh Sargsyan, who said on resigning: “I was wrong while Nikol Pashinyan was right.”

The messiest chapter is the fight with the Armenian Apostolic Church. Pashinyan publicly accused Catholicos Karekin II of breaking his celibacy vow, demanded he resign and announced a body to remove him; critics say that itself breaches the constitutional separation of church and state. In June 2025 security services arrested Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, whom the Investigative Committee accused of planning bombings and arson. His lawyer called the charges “fiction”, while Pashinyan wrote about a plot by the “criminal oligarch clergy to destabilize Armenia and take power”.

The June 2026 election was the first since Armenia's military defeat by Azerbaijan, and Pashinyan called it a “historic victory”. Civil Contract took 49.7% and 64 of 105 seats, enough to govern alone. Opposition groups cited administrative pressure and arrests, and said the official figures were wrong. An independent observer said the electoral commission should have gone after the parties that benefited from vote-buying.

The upside is real. Border violence with Azerbaijan has stopped, the first Armenia-EU summit was held in Yerevan in May 2026, and Turkey and Armenia are slowly reopening their border. A peace deal is still stuck on Azerbaijan's demand that Armenia change its constitution, and Pashinyan's party fell short of the majority needed to call that referendum on its own.

So where does that leave a family page? He's no villain on the harm test, and he has paid a price for standing up to power. But the church arrests and the pre-election arrests of opponents are accusations worth watching, and the reporting on them is split between a government that says it is applying the law and critics who say it is hitting political rivals.