With the recent announcement by Armenia’s Central Election Commission certifying the results of the parliamentary elections, attention has shifted to the courts, where several opposition parties are challenging the results and demanding either recounts or revotes. This process is important primarily because the Prosperous Armenia Party missed the threshold for parliamentary seats by a small margin, officially listed at 3.9893% versus the required 4%.
With only a few votes separating Prosperous Armenia from participation in the National Assembly, a recount would seem reasonable. The participation of the Prosperous Armenia Party would readjust the distribution of the 105 seats and reduce the majority of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract Party from 64 to 61. In the short term, the most important issue before the Armenian people is the proposed constitutional change prepared by the governing Civil Contract Party. The plan has been to prepare a draft and begin the approval process after the national elections. A new Constitution or amendments require a popular referendum, but legislative approval requires a two-thirds majority.
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We all know what this will entail. A constitution that will dilute the essence of Armenian nationhood and weaken Armenian statehood, weaken the separation of powers, weaken the National Assembly and the Constitutional Court by accumulating all power to himself whether as prime minister or as an executive president or by fusing the two posts, remove Mount Ararat and the four historical Armenian states from the coat of arms and other Armenian symbols, weaken the provisions of territorial integrity and allow the cession of Armenian territory without a national referendum and by bypassing the National Assembly (the latter two especially in order to appease and please the two aggressive and expansionist Turkic archenemies), remove the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church as a national church and from the constitution, remove the reference to the Armenian Diaspora and ban the automatic naturalization of Diaspora Armenians. This will not be an Armenian constitution, but (behind a democratic facade) an autocratic and capitulationist Pashinyan constitution, drafted by Pashinyan, and “corrected” and amended by Aliyev and Erdogan, opening the way for a Pashinyan dictatorship and Armenia becoming a joint puppet state of Turkey and Azerbaijan.