National Assembly — June 7, 2026
About this election
Armenia held parliamentary elections on 7 June 2026 to elect the National Assembly (Azgayin Joghov). Nikol Pashinyan's Civil Contract party won a third consecutive term in power, continuing the government it first formed after the 2018 Velvet Revolution. Civil Contract won 64 of the 105 seats with 49.83% of the vote — a reduced majority compared with 2021, but enough to govern alone. The largest opposition force was the newly formed Strong Armenia, led by the businessman Samvel Karapetyan, which took 29 seats; the Armenia Alliance, linked to former President Robert Kocharyan, won 12. Official turnout was 58.97%, with 1,476,597 votes cast and all 2,005 polling stations reporting. The vote was held against the backdrop of dramatic recent events — the September 2023 Azerbaijani offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, the dissolution of the self-declared Karabakh republic, and the exodus of roughly 100,000 ethnic Armenians to Armenia — which reshaped the country's foreign-policy debate.
Nikol Pashinyan came to power in 2018 through the peaceful "Velvet Revolution", a wave of street protests that ended the long dominance of the Republican Party. His tenure has been defined above all by the conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh: the lost 2020 war, and then the collapse of the enclave in 2023 and the flight of its Armenian population. Those events split Armenian opinion bitterly — between those who blame the government for the defeat and those who argue the loss was the inevitable result of decades of unresolved conflict — and turned the 2026 campaign into a contest over Armenia's strategic direction as much as over domestic policy. They also strained Armenia's decades-old alliance with Russia, whose peacekeepers did not prevent the enclave's fall, accelerating a debate about whether the country's security should rest with Moscow or with closer ties to the European Union and the West.
Armenia elects its unicameral National Assembly by proportional representation from a single nationwide constituency, with the 105 seats of this convocation distributed among the parties and alliances that clear the legal threshold. Within each party's allocation, seats are filled first from a closed national list and then according to candidates' constituency-level preference votes. The system is designed to guarantee a workable government: if the winning party falls short of a secure majority, "stability" rules top it up with additional mandates, and if no governing majority emerges, a run-off between the two leading forces can be held. The prime minister is chosen by the parliamentary majority and holds executive power; the president, elected by the Assembly, is largely ceremonial.
Civil Contract, Pashinyan's governing party, ran on its record and on an explicitly pro-Western, reform-and-peace platform. Strong Armenia, a new party built around the wealthy businessman Samvel Karapetyan, emerged as the main challenger and the chief vehicle for opposition to the government. The Armenia Alliance, associated with former President Robert Kocharyan, and the once-powerful Prosperous Armenia of Gagik Tsarukyan also contested; Prosperous Armenia polled around 4% and fell short of representation. The fragmentation of the opposition into competing blocs, rather than a single anti-government front, again worked to Civil Contract's advantage.
The 2026 election was widely described as the most geopoliticised in Armenia's modern history. Pashinyan campaigned on deepening ties with the European Union and the West and on finalising a peace settlement with Azerbaijan, while the opposition emphasised Armenia's traditional security relationship with Russia and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO). International actors took unusually open positions: the European Union, the United States, Azerbaijan and Turkey were seen as favourable to Pashinyan's continuation, while Russia was hostile to his re-election. Reuters reported that Russia had engaged in covert interference, including disinformation and efforts to mobilise Russian-based Armenians to influence the result — claims that further sharpened the campaign's East-versus-West framing.
Pashinyan declared victory and reaffirmed his European orientation, describing the EU as Armenia's main partner in democratic reform. Samvel Karapetyan rejected the outcome, alleged that the vote had been rigged and called for fresh elections. With Civil Contract holding an outright majority of seats, however, Pashinyan was positioned to form a government and continue his peace-and-Europe agenda, while the divided opposition was left to contest the result from outside power.
Armenia's previous parliamentary elections were held on 20 June 2021 — snap elections called amid public anger after the 2020 war. Civil Contract won then with a clear majority against an Armenia Alliance built around Kocharyan and an I Have Honour alliance linked to former President Serzh Sargsyan. The 2026 result confirmed Pashinyan's grip on power for a third term, but on a reduced vote share and against a reshaped opposition in which Karapetyan's Strong Armenia, not the established former-president blocs, had become the principal challenger.
Turnout of 58.97% was broadly in line with recent Armenian parliamentary elections and, in a contest framed as existential by both sides, neither collapsed nor surged. The headline story of the result was less Civil Contract's win than the recomposition of the opposition: the established blocs built around former presidents Kocharyan and Sargsyan, which had led the anti-Pashinyan camp since 2018, were overtaken by Samvel Karapetyan's Strong Armenia. Civil Contract's vote share fell from its 2021 level, yet a fragmented opposition meant the reduction did not cost it its governing majority.
With an outright majority, Civil Contract is able to form a single-party government and re-elect Pashinyan as prime minister without needing a coalition. The central questions for the new parliament are the peace settlement with Azerbaijan, the future of relations with Russia and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, and the pace of Armenia's stated move towards the European Union. The opposition's rejection of the result and Karapetyan's demand for fresh elections signal continued political confrontation, but without the parliamentary numbers to force a change of government.
Armenia elects its National Assembly from a single nationwide constituency, so the headline result is a national one rather than a sum of district contests. The Central Electoral Commission reports figures by region (marz) and by polling station, but it did not publish a consolidated, machine-readable results-by-region table, and no reliable numeric per-region breakdown has been compiled. For that reason no regional results map is shown here — only the national result above. (Reported turnout varied by region, running higher closer to the eastern border.)
Central Electoral Commission of Armenia — elections.am. Final results are certified by the Commission following the count of all polling stations.