Armenia held a historic parliamentary election on June 7. The Contract Party, the party of the current Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan, won. Pashinyan lost the war twice to Azerbaijan in 2020 and 2023, suffering territorial loss for Armenia. Still, about 50% of voters supported the Contract Party. Why? Can leaders lose a war and retain power? Surprisingly, in international relations, it sometimes happens that democratic leaders maintain power even after losing a war. But it is still intriguing that Pashinyan pulled it off twice and now, three times. The answer to his political survival appears to lie in the foreign alignment in Pashinyan’s playbook. It is the playbook many of the Eurasian countries play nowadays, so the case provides a general lesson for contemporary international politics.

The primary fault line in contemporary Armenian politics has been between the pro-West and the pro-Russia. Couched between big powers like Russia and the West, Armenia had a distant past under Soviet influence until the fall of the Berlin Wall. The West, in the Armenian context, is associated with the EU and the US. Pashinyan’s Contract Party has associated itself with the West. The opposition parties (Strong Armenia, Armenia Alliance, Prosperous Armenia, and a host of other parties) have been mostly aligned with Russia.

As in many elections, economic and security issues are on the agenda and what matters to the voters. In small states like Armenia, foreign alignment is acutely related to the state’s fate. Voters seem to be aware that Armenia’s economic and security are acutely tied to Armenia’s external relations. The Contract Party’s election slogan was “Stand for Peace.” The slogan reminds voters of the continuity in the absence of active conflict with Armenia and promises economic benefits if Armenia stays on the pro-Western path.

Opposition parties, on the other hand, are many and not coalesced. The most viable opposition leader of Strong Armenia, Samvel Karapetyan, was a business tycoon with Russian ties, who collected........

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