Warning: This is a rush transcript generated automatically and may contain errors.
Asbed: Hello and welcome to Groong’s Week in Review. We got you covered for the week that was for May 24, 2026. Hovik, how are you?
Hovik: I don’t think anyone, any Armenian, could not be concerned right now. So we are living in very concerning times. And there’s a lot of tension in terms of the electoral atmosphere and the campaigning. Hey Asbed,
Asbed: we were initially supposed to make this recording earlier this morning, that’s May 25, but we waited for whatever reason, we ended up doing this at midnight, so essentially we’re doing this on May 26. In the meantime, some news has come about that Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State of the United States, is going to visit Armenia tomorrow, actually, well today, Tuesday. Do you know anything more about this?
Hovik: No, I mean, it was a pretty sudden announcement, and not even through leaks. You know, when Vance visited, there were leaks about it. So he’s visiting us from India, and the official schedule says there will be some kind of a signing ceremony after he meets Mirzoyan. But the reason for this seemingly urgent trip is making everyone guess And it’s worthwhile to mention that it’s taking place two weeks after the US-China summit that was followed also by Putin’s visit to China.
So an Armenian, I was just listening to I’m listening to an Armenian analyst Hakob Badalyan, we’ll include the link at the show notes, that says he had an interesting take and he says that there’s a constellation of reasons that could include some of the urgency. First, of course, is the war in Iran. Second is those meetings between China and the US. We know that TRIPP is seen as a critical part of the middle corridor that links China to Europe.
Badalyan was speculating that essentially by taking TRIPP, the U.S. is taking control of that critical connection. And yeah, that was the focus of his report, although it remains to be seen. But it’s important to highlight how TRIPP came about, right?
In late 2025, just two days before Witkoff visited Putin to have those negotiations about the Alaska summit, They announced TRIPP, so two days before Witkoff’s visit, and then after that Russia was relatively quiet on TRIPP until early this year, I think Yeah, so he thinks that, you know, he’s asking whether some kind of internal verbal maybe agreements or secret agreements between U.S. and Russia have been violated when Russia earlier this year started to violently talk about TRIPP being a bad idea and mentioning the Treaty of Turkmenchay and saying that it disrupts internal balance and there will be no peace I think that was the exact words there will be no peace in the region if there is if that balance is disturbed
Asbed: So this is an entire dimension that I hadn’t really thought about just in one day. I was essentially thinking that Marco Rubio is coming here because Pashinyan is not winning enough in the elections. So basically to give him another boost. I mean, in February, we had JD Vance here and he flat out endorsed Pashinyan for the reelection as prime minister.
And then, you know, we had the EPC summit and we’ll talk a little bit more about that, but maybe it hasn’t been enough. So he’s not winning.
Hovik: I mean, that’s possible. Undoubtedly, Pashinyan will try to gain electoral points out of this. But I’m just thinking, okay, you are the US, you have a war with Iran that’s still ongoing. You have all these crises around the world and you’re here to prop up Pashinyan.
I don’t know. It doesn’t pass a smell test for me, but it remains to be seen, I guess.
Asbed: Armenia has become the crossroads of politics.
Hovik: Yeah.
Asbed: Well, let’s talk some more about it next week when we know a little bit more, and we’ll also dig up the right people to start talking about this and analyze the issue. In the meantime, Hovik, it’s election time. Polls are aplenty, and in the past we’ve We’ve seen a number of poll results from IRI, for example, and MPG. We have another poll that we’d never heard of and you know I don’t exactly know how reliable it is but I found it through ArmInfo via the California Courier we’ll talk about those things.
Why don’t you start us off with the MPG poll?
Hovik: Yeah, the MPG poll was conducted between May 19 and 21. I really like their short period of fieldwork because it takes a better snapshot of sentiment at a specific point in time. We will have more details on our show notes.
I’m just going to cover a few questions and then we will spend some time talking about poll reliability because the bigger question I think the elephant in the room is that there are these different polls that are painting a completely different picture if you believe the polls from IRI and EVN Report then Nikol has 90% in the parliament, along with some satellite forces if you believe MPG then it’s a slightly different picture and I tried to come up with a numerical method for establishing the reliability of these polls but before that let’s go to a few questions that were asked in this poll the first question that I would like to talk about is the following will the 2026 parliamentary elections in Armenia be fair or will they be rigged? or more than 51% said that the elections would be free and fair and more than 36% said that the elections would be conducted with falsifications
Asbed: Well, so exactly. We talked a little bit about this from the previous MPG poll. I think the most important thing, though, is what they will do. What percentage of the people are prepared to do something about it if they find out that, you know, it’s been falsified?
Hovik: If the parliamentary elections are unfair, are you ready to take to the streets to fight for justice or fight to defend your right, your vote? 51% of all the respondents to that question said they will do so.
Asbed: Is the number up or down from the previous poll, do you know?
Hovik: It has also grown. So in the previous poll, it was 36.6 plus 9.9. 47% were saying they will hit the streets. Now it’s more than 51%.
Asbed: Interesting. Okay.
Hovik: Yeah. Then the poll had a lot of questions about the campaign of which parties did you notice, hear about? There was also a question about which party’s brochure or program did you read? And I actually spent a lot of time trying to analyze that.
A lot of the voters or a lot of the respondents indicated that, yes, they are exposed to campaign material from all parties. More than 50% said that they were exposed to Civil Contract material or campaign. And why that’s important is that’s essentially an indicator that This poll is hitting potential Civil Contract voters. So it’s not like this poll is only focused on the opposition voters.
There are true Civil Contract voters in this poll, and there’s a significant weight of Civil Contract voters. And of course, the most important questions that were asked related to the elections, one said, will you participate in the elections? And the other said, which party would you vote for? So more than 70% said they would participate in the elections. and I can read the breakdown of the major parties.
Asbed: Yeah. Well, if you can give us like the top five, for example, that’s interesting.
Hovik: So according to this poll, the top five are Civil Contract with 28.8%, Strong Armenia with 14.9%, Armenia Alliance with 12.1%, Prosperous Armenia with 8.7% and Wings of Unity with 5.8%. Now there’s a statistical trick that you can do if you take out the undecided voters and scale these numbers to represent only the decided voters, assuming that the undecided voters will vote in the same proportion, then you actually end up with a mandate distribution that would allow the opposition to form a coalition government, according to MPG, and altogether they would get 57.4% of the mandates.
So Civil Contract’s 28.8% when you take out the undecideds becomes 40% or 40.6% and the remaining goes to the opposition And if you have concerns about MPG and their reliability, just hold on because we’ll be talking about that.
Asbed: Before you move forward, remind me exactly how you are deciding that there are a healthy number of respondents who are on the pro-Pashinyan or the Civil Contract side?
Hovik: So the poll asks a lot of interesting questions. It says the major one is the percentage given to Nikol Pashinyan. 28.8% is within the range, plus or minus, of the other polls.
So IRI, the The vote for Pashinyan or for Civil Contract remains the same across all these polls like it’s between 28 and 30 something so that doesn’t change that much the only thing that changes in these polls is the opposition numbers the other questions for instance they asked which political party or alliance’s campaign have you seen noticed or encountered and among those polled More than 54% said they had seen Civil Contract campaign 35% they had seen the strong or they had been exposed to the Strong Armenia campaign and all of the other opposition including Prosperous Armenia There’s a good signal that the respondents have been exposed to their campaigns with the right proportions.
So it’s not like, you know, it’s lopsided. It’s, you know, from Civil Contract downward. They even ask questions about which party or alliance’s election program have you read? So that actually, instead of just measuring exposure, it measures engagement.
You know, exposure is passive. You passively can observe the campaign, a rally, but you have to do something active to read the material. So that’s why I think this poll has a good sample of Civil Contract respondents. Now, that is the result.
Now, whether It will remain so with the upcoming so-called military parade that is called an accountability parade.
Asbed: The inventory accountability.
Hovik: I wonder if Pashinyan has other surprises, like some other statesman visiting him to give him credit, Western statesmen. Maybe he will try to get a few more points, but it’s apparent through all these polls that no matter how hard Pashinyan tries, he can’t get more than 30-40% in the general polls.
Asbed: So, Hovik, what does this translate to percentages or rather mandates in the parliament?
Hovik: Okay, so again, in more detail, the mandates are if these numbers, if the voters vote the same way that the substantive responses in this report indicate, then it would be 40.6% for Civil Contract. 20.8% for Strong Armenia 16.8% for Armenia Alliance 11.9% for Prosperous Armenia and Wings of Unity would be at 7.9% and there are actually a few contenders runners up that are very close to hitting the threshold but they just missed it by a few tenths of a percentage point.
So it’s possible if this poll is accurate then DOK and Bright Armenia might also have a chance in the parliament because especially DOK they’re at 3.9% if you scale them so it remains to be seen. But that’s going to be the makeup and essentially to repeat it will translate into the collective opposition if they decide to unite. I’m not sure if I can put my money on that. If they decide to unite they will get 57% of the mandates.
Asbed: So that means they could actually take up the responsibility of forming a government if that were to happen. Yeah.
Hovik: Although it will be a very rancorous, indecisive coalition because many of the things that people are vying for, such as getting Samvel Karapetyan as prime minister and so forth, are not going to be possible unless you have a constitutional majority. And it’s not even clear that all the opposition parties would vote to change the law to allow Samvel Karapetyan to win. So if that doesn’t happen, then as the single most highest vote gainer, Let’s say in the elections, what would Strong Armenia do? Well, on the other hand,
Asbed: though, don’t forget that if somehow Strong Armenia cannot become the prime minister’s party, then Armenia Alliance comes in fairly close to second. But a number of parties have put a red line that they will not join an alliance where Robert Kocharyan is going to become prime minister. So this is this is quite a dilemma, I think, for the opposition.
Hovik: Yeah, in all honesty, I mean, and we will have a parliament with 40% of votes controlled by Civil Contract, which is, I’ve expressed this previously as well, I think that this will be a temporary parliament, and the best thing that could happen is if it’s dissolved as soon as possible, and new elections are organized afterwards, assuming that Civil Contract, of course, loses. Without Civil Contract holding on to the administrative resources, because most of these 30% or 40% that Civil Contract has are purely due to admin resources.
Asbed: You know, what you just said is almost exactly the platform of Bolorin Dem, Against All. That as soon as the government is formed, they should make a few changes and then dissolve themselves for new parliamentary elections, which is what their platform is.
Hovik: They also want to remove the stable majority clause in the parliament. So I think that one way or another, I think that sentiment exists and I don’t think it will be possible to Govern Armenia without a strong mandate by a single party, no matter what. Especially when in these trying times with Aliyev and so forth, negotiating with Aliyev, whoever leads Armenia needs to have a strong mandate.
Asbed: Hovik, let’s talk about this Hidden Vote Index that we’ve been discussing offline. It’s a good time to do this for this poll because the contrast is kind of extreme with the IRI poll that I want to talk about later.
Hovik: So that was a question I was asking myself is, you know, a lot of people are saying, well, how do you trust MPG versus IRI? And I tried to come up with a mathematical way to do this. I mean, it’s not my own invention. I did some research on it.
I have tried to capture three metrics that indicate the quality of the poll or the potential for the poll to be skewed. Hidden Vote Index that measures the amount of people who did not disclose who they would vote for. They either said, I don’t know, or I refuse to respond, or I have a difficulty in responding. So in this poll for MPG, that’s 12%.
Very small compared to the same number for IRI and EVN Report. Then I measured something called the Participation Certainty Index. That’s the amount of people, according to the poll, who said yes, they will participate in the vote. And in the MPG, that’s 73.3%.
Okay, so that’s also a good signal because it shows marked differences from EVN Report and IRI who are predicting like 90% turnout.
Asbed: Yeah, basically 92% in the IRI.
Hovik: And the last metric that we’re going to capture for every poll now that we talk about that the data is available for, we’ll capture the Participation Sensitivity Gap. Now imagine you ask someone a question, like, you know, the respondent says, yes, I’m going to participate in the poll. First step. Second step, you ask them an easy question, like, what is the direction of the country?
Or in this case, will you participate in the elections? And that’s an easy question. There’s nothing sensitive about that. If the government is wiretapping you, they don’t know in whose favor you will vote.
So they will say yes. And that’s the participation certainty index. 73.3% said they would participate in the elections. Then you ask them, who will you vote for? And then a lot more people get nervous and say, I don’t know, or I refuse to respond.
So the gap is the measure between the total amount of people who said they would participate and the total amount of people who are decided voters, who had an idea of who they would vote for. So for this poll, that gap is only 5%. That means that very few shy voters, according to MPG, Meanwhile, when you look at IRI report and EVN Report, these numbers are astronomical. You could drive a truck through it, which is why I think that this poll needs more attention than the others.
And we will also include this in the show notes. We will show it on the screen if you’re watching it on video. But for every poll we’ll talk about, I’m going to make it a point. I’m going to try hard to include this dashboard so you can see numerically how reliable this poll could be.
Or if there is a problem, you might have some answers. And I have a hypothesis why IRI and EVN Report are showing such different results, and we can talk about that. I think you read the IRI poll more than I did, so tell me.
Asbed: Yeah, I went through it. Okay, so on to the much-ballyhooed IRI poll. Let’s talk a little bit about that. It was conducted right during the time when the EPC, the European Political Community Summit was in Yerevan, as well as the EU-Armenia Summit and the Yerevan Dialogue, orgasmic festival of love, which bathed the government and public airwaves with peace, peace, peace, heart-sign photo ops for Pashinyan and every EU leader.
As I say, Eurovision. It was basically Eurovision.
Hovik: But more importantly, do you remember the previous poll to IRI when it was conducted? It was right during Vance’s visit.
Asbed: That’s absolutely right.
Hovik: That’s absolutely right. If there is momentary euphoria or media attention, I mean, that obviously skews the results. For listeners, you know.
Asbed: Guess what else was happening during the EPC? We had Macron, I think, jogging in the streets of Yerevan and just taking all these selfies and showing that Yerevan is just this beautiful European city. So it is not a surprise to see that respondents said that Armenia’s most important political ally is France. It’s not the United States.
It’s not the EU. It’s not Russia. It’s France who is the most important ally. Well, by the way, they’re calling it the political ally.
It’s not an ally. And make what you want of that. But what I make of that is the fact that political removes the responsibility for doing anything. There’s no security implications.
There’s no security guarantees. There’s no defense aspect to the whole thing. They’re going to release press releases when they kill our Armenians or they take over some of your sovereign land or whatever. Anyway, enough of a rant for the moment. 75% of the poll respondents have said that they want EU accession.
And the poll results read like how a Pashinyan election win would look like. And what do these 75% people want from EU accession? They want economic growth. They want visa liberalization and peace.
Let me ask again, how important is it for 3 million Armenians to have visa liberalization with the EU? What’s in it, Hovik? I’m not understanding how important this issue is, or is it just the PR that’s going on in the country?
Hovik: I think it’s populist rhetoric, you know, trying to give candy to the voters and why not? Like if you’re a voter, you can go and visit Europe. I mean, it’s another thing whether you could even afford to spend a day in Paris eating dinner, but most Armenians don’t have enough salary to do that.
Asbed: Yeah.
Hovik: But it sounds nice and we should remember, right? There was a sale. I think one of the airlines was doing a sale where you could travel to Cyprus for $2 or something, you know,
Asbed: one way or something.
Hovik: And Pashinyan said, you know, with the pensions I raised, you can travel to Cyprus and come back 15 times or something like that, you know. So it’s in the same tone. Again, I think that
Asbed: Well, Hovik, you’re right. I mean, the whole thing just basically could have been taken out of Pashinyan’s campaign slogans. The poll results are just so perfectly matched to that. So let’s take a quick look at voter trust here.
At 29%, Pashinyan by far leads all politicians in trust. Samvel Karapetyan is 8%, Ararat Mirzoyan is 5%, Robert Kocharyan is 4%, and Gagik Tsarukyan is 3%. I hear the sound of a truck passing by, sorry. It’s interesting to look at the support levels for each of the parties also. 32% support Civil Contract and Pashinyan, 6% support Strong Armenia, 3% support Armenia Alliance, and then, just as you were telling us, 23% are undecided still.
And another 20%.
Hovik: And another 21% refused to answer.
Asbed: Yeah, they didn’t want to answer. I mean, one of the most interesting aspects of this whole thing. Okay, so the 29% or the 32%, let’s say that is kind of matching what MPG is seeing about a third or a little bit less than third support in the population for Civil Contract. But IRI sees a highly deflated number of support for each of the opposition candidates and their parties I’m sorry but 23% undecided and 21% now this is going to be nearly half of the population the respondents who do not want to respond
Hovik: to the IRI why is that I mean actually so so they they respond to the poll except they don’t want to respond to that specific question and that’s again what I call the hidden vote It could indicate fear about saying something on the phone that could be wiretapped. It could indicate some kind of hesitation. And I think Occam’s razor is that the amount of fear in the environment right now, in the whole electoral environment, is so high when Pashinyan is actually threatening to kill opposition leaders. I would be surprised if there were no hesitation.
So the question is: why is the MPG poll so different. So I think that voters have some kind of an understanding of who they’re talking to.
Asbed: There’s some kind of a bias going on.
Hovik: If they’re talking to a foreign organization, if they responded like EVN Report, the two professors are from University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I don’t know how they identify themselves, but it could be like, hey, we’re calling on behalf of this project that is sponsored by the University of Las Vegas. First, Pro-opposition voters would probably be discouraged from that greeting and may not even continue, right?
But then, if they do continue, they have that knowledge that these pollsters are from the U.S. government, which is currently pushing TRIPP and pro-Pashinyan, so they may have a hesitation in talking to the U.S. government or even a U.S. organization and telling them their intentions, because everyone is being listened to in Armenia, wiretap.
Asbed: But let me also mention that this number, this undecided and refused to respond categories, have actually gone up since the previous IRI poll. So there’s a larger number of people who are not communicating their preferences, which is kind of interesting to see.
Hovik: Asbed, since you talked about it, I also want to mention, I actually plotted six polls. I plotted the Hidden Vote Index, which is that number. The higher that index, the stronger the support for Pashinyan and the lower that index, the stronger the opposition support. I mean it’s it’s linear you can you can draw a trend line to it which is another indicator that hey even if i take out the MPG polls from that graph and i’ll include the graph in the show notes you still see a trend line from poll to poll doesn’t uh matter the time if that poll is showing that the hidden vote index is high then the opposition Numbers are low and vice versa.
Asbed: So in conclusion for this one segment, Hovik, we think that a lot of people who are not pro-Pashinyan types may not be fully disclosing their preferences to Western NGO polling. Exactly. And some of your numbers corroborate that.
Hovik: I mean, that’s one hypothesis. I want to actually test this out in the future, but we’ll talk more about that. And I have some interesting ideas, hopefully interesting, that maybe can involve crowdfunding our supporters, but we’ll see.
Asbed: Yeah. I want to very quickly mention, I can’t go through a gazillion slides, obviously, so I just want to mention that the Armenian Church remains a very highly trusted institution in Armenia. Despite all of Pashinyan’s efforts and attacks on the Armenian Church, ad hominem attacks on the Catholicos, the church remains in higher regard actually than Pashinyan’s office, which is very interesting. And of course, as Pashinyan would like you to believe, the army and the police are seen as the highest-trust institutions in Armenia, even though I would say that We haven’t seen a single military drill or military exercise on the part of the army.
I’m not sure what their state of readiness is, what their size is, exactly what’s going to happen, but we’ll take it for what they’re saying. You mentioned the TRIPP. Can I talk a little bit about that for just a moment? Pashinyan’s signature foreign policy accomplishment is the Trump Route, the TRIPP.
It does not enjoy universal support. Even in the IRI poll, 44% are for it and 42% are against it. 61% say Armenia is headed in the right direction. The funny thing is only 32% are naming Civil Contract and Pashinyan as their vote choice. Even among very likely voters, Civil Contract is at 38%.
So this suggests that right direction is not necessarily highly associated with the government support. Isn’t that a little strange? I mean, what do they think the right direction is going to be under, let’s say, Strong Armenia or Armenia Alliance? Do they think it’s going to stay the same?
It’s going to be a pro-EU or I don’t exactly know what they’re thinking. I find it strange that 61% think that we’re headed in the right direction and only 32% are voting for the people who are maintaining that direction.
Hovik: I forget who said it, but the only poll that matters is going to be the one on Election Day. I think that will be more difficult to change in such high numbers. I mean, Pashinyan will do everything, and I’m not even excluding the fact that he will falsify a portion of the vote, but given that it involves physical ballot counting, it will be more difficult. There may be a few percentages here and there, but I think that the vote, the actual vote on the day of the elections, We’ll have a better indicator.
Asbed: You say free and fair elections and in the IRI poll, 71% of the respondents expect free and fair elections and 40% trust absolutely no politicians. Do they think elections run themselves?
Hovik: Again, contradictions are many in this report.
Asbed: If there’s nobody to trust, how are we going to have free and fair elections? Similarly, we have 62% who are satisfied with the Prime Minister’s Office, 40% trust no politicians. Sometimes these little incongruities make you wonder where some of these responses are coming from. Or maybe there’s a place that we can say they’re thinking about Civil Contract and the policies that they’re seeing and they’re liking it, okay, but maybe Pashinyan has become a liability even to his own party.
And we’re going to talk a little bit about that in a moment when we’re done with these polls. So I guess I can conclude that the IRI poll is rather favorable to Pashinyan’s government, but not in a very clean way. The government leads, the opposition is weak, and voters broadly expect, well, in the context we should say they hope, the elections are going to be free and fair, but trust in politicians is really poor, undecided voters are high, and TRIPP remains deeply polarizing, even within the context of this Western poll.
The poll’s biggest issue is that several topline pro-government findings are accompanied with very weak political trust and large non-committed electorates.
Hovik: Just to close this poll, or our discussion on this poll, the Hidden Vote Index is 44%. That means when you asked who you will vote for, 44% refused to disclose. When you measure the gap between those who said yes, they will participate, I call it the sensitivity gap, yes, I will participate, but then they refuse to disclose who they will vote for, that gap is essentially 43%. In the IRI poll, nearly 99% of the respondents Either knew that they were going to vote or knew that they were not going to vote.
So 92% said they will vote for sure and 7% said they won’t vote and 1% is the remaining undecided. If you subtract 1 from 44 you get 43% of people essentially are nervous to disclose to the pollster their true voting intention. I have a little comparative analysis. I’m not going to go into too much, but I will include it in the show notes.
I analyzed all the six polls that were released, public polls, that were released since, let’s say, March or February. Yeah, I guess March. Two from each pollster. Two from MPG, two from EVN Report, and two from IRI.
I calculated the Hidden Vote Index, so just go to our show notes and you will see how stark the differences are. The MPG poll has a very has a low or very low hidden vote index meaning that voters aren’t shy to disclose to the pollster their voting intention and for EVN Report and IRI that number is truck-worthy. I’ll include my trend line that shows the clear correlation among all these polls. And yes, correlation is not causation, but I’m going to repeat my hypothesis, and I would like to test this in the future, is that different polling organizations attract different groups of people.
And, you know, someone might think, you know, I’ll answer to a local Armenian poll, but someone else might answer only to international polls. The only thing that I will give credit to IRI is they publish their response rate and it was 16% this time. Now the last poll that they did was 22%. So that indicates even a drop in the response rate, which also needs to be taken in as a signal that people are more reluctant to respond to their polls.
Now we don’t know if others are suffering from the same dynamics, but at least, you know, I can give credit to IRI for publishing that.
Asbed: So there’s this poll from CAEAC and boy I noticed that it’s very palindromic, CAEAC. Okay, anyway, let’s stop being funny about it. It was conducted from May 4 to 11 by the Free Alliance of Euro-Asian Sociologists. They focus on countries of Eurasia, particularly Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan, with a focus on issues of politics, international relations, and security.
And I just want to preface it again and again by saying that we don’t know a whole lot about these people. We came across it in an Armenian newspaper. The link is going to be in the show notes. The results are very incompatible with just about every other poll.
Take this with a very, very heavy grain of salt. They note that Samvel Karapetyan’s Strong Armenia party is almost 3% ahead of the ruling Civil Contract party. They have 20.6% versus 17.8%. According to the results of the survey, the votes of approximately 60% of the voters who intend to go to the polls would be distributed among the main political forces as follows.
United opposition would be Karapetyan, Kocharyan, and Tsarukyan, they would have 46%, and Civil Contract as the ruling party would have 18%. Taking account of spoilers, the opposition would have captured more than half of the votes, while the pro-government camp would have approached 30% of the votes. Samvel and Narek Karapetyan, and Robert Kocharyan, have positive ratings. This is what it said in the article, but I believe that they are talking about the trust and versus distrust levels.
And Pashinyan is the most unpopular in the country, trusted by approximately 11% and distrusted by approximately 79% of the population. So the poll is out there and for what it’s worth, we just want you to be aware of it.
Hovik: Well, I mean, we just see the publicly reported newspaper results, but I think it’s important to state that unless we see the full report, maybe the report exists, actually we’ll try to find it and especially find all those answers like the non-substantive responses, the error margin, and anything else like that. you know unless we have that saying these numbers is less meaningful we already gave you a disclaimer yeah but uh saying these numbers is less meaningful than uh the MPG poll the IRI poll and the EVN Report poll for which we have the More data, let’s just put it that way.
So let’s look at this data and maybe we can come back to it in the future.
Asbed: Maybe somebody decided to have the anti-Kopalyan, anti-UNLV poll out there. Well, all right. Should we go to elections? Let’s talk about elections, Hovik.
Hovik: It continues to be a very, very tumultuous campaign with Pashinyan threatening to to either jail his opposition leaders, to make them kneel in front of him, or to even kill them. But one of the key topics of this campaign was the settlement of Azerbaijanis in Armenia. Opposition is bringing this up, and I think justifiably, that, you know, if Pashinyan wins the elections, then there will be a gradual settlement of Azerbaijanis in Armenia. And the basis for that is Aliyev’s own agenda and Aliyev’s own words.
Aliyev, the government of of Azerbaijan funds an organization called Return to Western Azerbaijan or Western Azerbaijan. They make statements about, yes, we’re going to be returning eventually. Aliyev has told Pashinyan in the past, you must negotiate with these people, and they claim to be descendants of displaced Azerbaijanis. Here’s a funny part.
They say that they have a list of 300,000 Azerbaijanis who want to return to Armenia. Now, even in the late 1980s, I think the official numbers are there were 200,000 Azerbaijanis in Armenia. So when the government of Azerbaijan is making these statements, when they’re regularly holding festivals, they’re going to hold a festival in Nakhichevan soon, and all these events are very well organized, they invite Western experts, they invite EU experts to attend, what can the opposition conclude about that This is essentially being hidden from the public because it would not look good for Pashinyan to say, yes, we’re going to bring in 100,000.
Maybe it begins with like 10,000. Maybe it begins with one village on the TRIPP road, just right next to TRIPP. But it’s beyond question that This is an agenda that Azerbaijan has, and given Azerbaijan’s track record and Aliyev’s track record, I think that Aliyev has very high chances with Pashinyan of implementing this.
What’s regrettable is that all of these Western-funded, foreign-funded fact-checkers are essentially fact-checking this, right they’re saying this is false because the government of Armenia denies this and the effect this has is reducing visibility for media that talk about this and reducing the voice of the opposition yeah and I will just add that even Aliyev in one of his recent public statements or interviews said that Yes, this is on our agenda, but we decided to drive it in parallel with the peace talks, so they’re not making it a precondition to the peace talks.
And he explicitly mentioned, given the sensitivity of the nature, and given that Armenian people might find this a little unsettling, but he has said that we will return to Armenia We will not go there in tanks. We will drive there in cars.
Asbed: Well, all I can say is it shows that Pashinyan is clearly lying about this issue. He says he’s not discussing it. Well, maybe it’s not on the agenda of negotiations, like they don’t sit necessarily and talk about this, but this problem exists.
Hovik: Do you remember when Pashinyan was denying that Armenia was negotiating in the OSCE, that Armenia had a proposal from the OSCE Minsk Group in 2019. Pashinyan kept saying that there is no such proposal, we’re not discussing this. And we finally figured out that there actually was a proposal that he ignored because he said,
Asbed: it’s not addressed to me. Right. So let’s move on. Personally, I don’t even want to dignify this.
If I were president and some politician came to Armenia and asked me to talk about this, I would say, the next time you raise this issue, I’m putting you in a taxi to the airport and you’re not coming back to Armenia and
Hovik: we’re done. Yes, we shouldn’t dignify that rhetoric, but we should say that actually If Pashinyan somehow holds on to power after the elections, there will be 300,000, most likely there will be 300,000, 300,000 Azerbaijanis in Armenia. That’s more truthful than the opposite.
Asbed: So I want to ask you to talk a little bit about this. We talked about Pashinyan threatening people and jailing people and what have you. There’s Andranik Tevanyan’s issue. You want to talk a little bit about this?
Hovik: Okay, so the issue of Andranik Tevanyan, he is number two on the Prosperous Armenia list. He’s from the actual Mother Armenia party, but they’re partnering with Prosperous Armenia. It was very weird, right? Pashinyan was…
Actually, in a previous podcast episode, I said it was during Parliament. Parliament is closed right now. Pashinyan is on vacation. So during one of his campaign rallies, he said, Andranik Tevanyan, you’re a traitor, and tomorrow the Investigative Committee will open a case and they will arrest you.
Asbed: Yeah.
Hovik: What happens the next day? Well,
Asbed: a whole bunch of NSS showed up and they couldn’t slap a two-month pretrial detention on Tevanyan any faster.
Hovik: Well, they did wait a little bit because during elections candidates have some kind of immunity, and the CEC has to temporarily lift it. So they apply to the CEC, but the CEC being run by Pashinyan’s friend immediately rubber-stamped the request and there we go. Now we have another opposition member in jail and the accusations- Tevanyan
Asbed: actually has a popular media site, 7or.am, right? I couldn’t access that website. And I think that they had confiscated all of their media equipment so that they could no longer broadcast. So they’ve been taken off the air as far as I could tell.
So what’s the real claim? What do they want?
Hovik: Why is he a traitor to the nation? So the claim is that for 622,000… Remember, these are all allegations by the government that is known to fabricate data. Please keep that in mind.
The government alleges that Tevanyan received $622,000 in order to pass on to a foreign company, I think maybe Russian, I don’t know, that’s what they’re insinuating, some details of a parliamentary meeting, a closed-door session of the parliament. Now, Tevanyan was not a Member of Parliament at that time, in 2024, when the alleged events happened. The meeting was not secret, it was closed doors, and the transcript or the summary of the meeting was published on the National Assembly website. So despite this, and that’s according to Gegham Manukyan from the ARF, from an interview he gave.
Essentially, despite this, they say that Tevanyan without having any co-conspirators somehow found out what was being discussed in this closed-door session of the parliament and passed it on to a foreign agency and that was material that amounted to treason. Again, according to Gegham Manukyan, none of the material in that session which he was present at was secret. It was not classified as secret.
So and the parliament itself published that so it’s obvious I mean to me this is obvious that this is another attempt to silence the opposition but why wait two years right this happened in 2024 and right during elections two weeks before the elections You make this accusation and you arrest him and you don’t allow him to campaign. You don’t allow him to his media to function. What is this other than pressure against the opposition?
Asbed: Well, maybe Marco Rubio is visiting so that he can make sure that the opposition is safe and, you know, out of jail and everything.
Hovik: Yeah. Well, I was, I was really, I’m sorry. Let’s bet whether Marco Rubio will talk about that or not. I’m giving you 10 to 1 odds.
Asbed: Maybe we’ll go on Polymarket and start something. Yeah, I was pretty affected by this week. I think that there was a fellow who was a mentally ill guy, Armen Hovanisyan. He was arrested for destroying a Pashinyan campaign poster.
I think the charge was obstructing or coercing participation in campaign activities. And normally something like this would carry an administrative fine as a maximum fine but he got jailed and then I guess in a few days they noticed that he was actually mentally ill and they transferred him to a mental institution and within a day the man committed suicide and there are sometimes cases that really affect you The guy scratches the poster and as a consequence of a number, a sequence of events, he loses his life. I was really, it was really terrible.
Hovik: You know, if campaign posters in Armenia are treated as so sacrosanct, then it’s not apparent to me when it concerns opposition campaign material. You know what they did? I think it was in Artik, if I’m not mistaken. They tied a Strong Armenia campaign poster to the tail of a dead dog.
I pray to God that they didn’t actually kill the dog first, that he was somehow dead of natural causes or was a roadkill. So they tied a Strong Armenia poster to the tail of a dead dog and put the dog in front of a cross, so attacking the church at the same time. And guess what? Were there any arrests in the Artik because of this?
I think you haven’t answered that already, so we don’t need to…
Asbed: But Hovik, speaking of that, we talked last week about Armine Soghoyan, who demanded some answers from Pashinyan on his campaign trail, and then she was threatened by firing from her job, and it’s starting to form some kind of a pattern here. There have been a lot of people who’ve been taken out of their jobs. There was that fellow in Syunik who was in the armed services, I think, he also got fired. Because he asked Pashinyan on the campaign trail to get paid more, as a serviceman.
And instead, he lost his job because.. well just because. Well, this week it was Arthur Osipyan, this man is a Yerevan based activist…
Hovik: He’s from Artsakh originally.
Asbed: … and a defender of the Artsakh Armenians, the rights of Artsakhtsis. He confronted Pashinyan at a campaign event and Pashinyan went apeshit ballistic about this. He had his security detail drag Osipyan away while he sought out a campaign megaphone and started pursuing him and screaming like a banshee, what are you doing here? You should have died while there was the Karabakh issue.
Why are you people alive, you scumbag? It was kind of a shocking thing, and it went viral. And what was the outcome? The outcome is obviously clear.
The opposition roundly criticized Pashinyan for his insane behavior. Osipyan, of course, was arrested for hooliganism. And hooliganism has basically become a grab-bag tool for the so-called hybrid war, meaning war on anyone who speaks out against Pashinyan. Osipyan was jailed and he started a hunger strike and he’s still in a hunger strike
Hovik: And this started about a week ago
Asbed: And all he’s demanding is that Pashinyan apologize to him. He was not violent. He was having an argument about this
Hovik: It’s all on video. You know, knowing people who have risked their lives to go fight. Knowing people who have lost their children in Artsakh to be called like I think he basically was effectively addressing the entire opposition and saying why are you not dead and he was addressing Artsakh Armenians because he said you with the Artsakhtsi accents and he said you with the pseudo-elite of Artsakh now I don’t want to go into details about Arthur Osipyan’s background because I believe that at some point in time he was pro-Pashinyan but that aside Pashinyan essentially turned this into a hate fest against Artsakhtsis.
And I want to, I want to ask you, Asbed, is that something that… We are covering this as if it’s a normal issue. Most media are treating this as a normal issue. But I think this transcends a little bit too far into the personal space into your families.
Why are you alive, Asbed? You know, tell me why you’re alive. And if you’re listening to us in the diaspora, are you alive? If you’re alive, what are you doing about this?
Asbed: I do not feel alive. I feel like all this, covering all this and living with all this news every week is killing me inside. And I think that this hate towards Artsakhtsis is hate towards Armenians, plain and simple. There’s no ifs or buts about this.
This is plain and simple hate for Armenians. I can’t put it any other way. And all I can say is take your meds, Nikol. The last thing that the Armenians need is a fucking psycho to be elected as prime minister of Armenian nation.
So I don’t know what else.
Hovik: I have no idea what else I can say. This is actually news, so it’s relevant. The “Alliance” Party, unfortunately, the only party in Armenia that was campaigning on bringing back the death penalty for treason has dropped out of the race. That’s all I can say.
And it is treason, it is worse than treason. It is treason to not only your country, it’s treason to your nation, it’s treason for the descendants of the Genocide survivors. Imagine a nation like ours, you know, having like clumped, being clumped together in a small land, 1.5 million of us in Armenia, and of course a much larger diaspora who kept the flame going. And then you have another Armenian Genocide happening in 2023, and you have a leader who carries an Armenian last name, whose actual background needs to be investigated, who says that, why are you alive?
And what really irks me is not that he’s saying that, is that he’s being allowed, to a certain extent, to continue that rhetoric. And I think most of our listeners, based on our view count, based on “vulgar polling”, to use Edgar Elbakyan’s term, among my friends no one cares. Everyone has tuned out. So actually I want to ask the diaspora are you alive still and if you are alive diaspora then you need to do everything possible to ensure that If you know anyone who can vote in Armenia on June 7, 2026, tell them, convince them, beg them, plead with them to go and vote.
It doesn’t matter how they vote, but please convince them to go and vote. Right.
Asbed: We are over our self-imposed time, but I think we have to cover one more thing. Okay. This stuff is nonstop. Pashinyan threatened to nationalize Gagik Tsarukyan’s cement factory.
Talk a little bit about that. Just a couple of minutes.
Hovik: I mean, that’s not new, but…
Asbed: Well, it’s just happening over the last two weeks.
Hovik: I was going to say that, you know, well, that’s to be expected of Pashinyan. I was going to say the way he did it was interesting, but also that’s also always how he does it. On his campaign trail, he said that If you vote for me, we’re going to strip all the property from Tsarukyan. They’re all going to be bums.
And specifically, he said, we’re going to nationalize the cement factory, which belongs to Tsarukyan. It’s a private property. And people ask, how? And then the Investigative Committee or I think it was the Prosecutor’s Office the following day dutifully.
I mean, he makes a campaign statement, right it’s not even a statement as an official prime minister, the following day the Prosecutor’s Office says: “We have looked into the events of the 2002 privatization of the cement factory and we have found violations… …and we have referred the case to the Anti-Corruption Committee of Armenia.” and that’s how things are being done in Armenia and that’s Armenia that Marco Rubio wants you to vote for. That’s the Armenia that Macron wants you to vote for.
And that’s an Armenia that, if it continues, then I think Pashinyan’s statement that whether we will be living or dead will sooner or later come true.
Asbed: Thanks, Hovik. I want to close with just two lines. You know, Ruben Vardanyan addressed the Armenian nation in Armenian, and I’m just going to translate that to English, and I’m just going to read that moment. Because it rings with me and in the past I’ve actually said this and I’ve said this multiple times.
Look, the greatest danger is indifference. Indifference is more dangerous than any other vice. The opposite of love is not hatred but indifference. The opposite of good is not evil but indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy but indifference. The opposite of life is not death but indifference. We cannot remain indifferent. We have a problem and we need to face it head-on, take it head-on.
We can’t just sit home and decide that it’s somebody else’s problem. Somebody else will go to the streets. Somebody else will do something. Whether you’re in the diaspora and whether you’re in the nation’s capital of Armenia, you have to do something about this.
You can’t remain indifferent. Well said. Thank you. Today is, I guess, May 26 at this point, Hovik.
I’m Asbed Bedrossian.
Hovik: And I’m Hovik Manucharyan, still wanting to be alive. We’ll talk to you next week.