Constitutional Court Will Likely Rule for Pashinyan: 60% Chance Nothing Changes, 20% for New Elections

Armenia’s Constitutional Court is scheduled to rule on June 7, 2026 election appeals by July 4, with six opposition parties and alliances having filed challenges demanding annulment. Hovik’s assessment of the court’s likely outcome is deeply pessimistic, rooted in the court’s composition and recent history of judicial capture. Pashinyan is the first Armenian leader to fully stack the Constitutional Court with loyalists, achieving this through methods that will likely feature prominently in future criminal proceedings: forcing judges to resign, modifying legal terms, and manipulating appointment processes. This judicial capture has left the court with minimal credibility as an independent arbiter.

Given this structural reality, Hovik assigns specific probability weightings to possible outcomes. He estimates a 60 percent likelihood that the court will rule that nothing substantively changes, allowing the election results to stand as certified by the Central Electoral Commission. He assigns a 20 percent probability that Prosperous Armenia’s votes will be reinstated after being invalidated on precincts grounds, an outcome that Asbed suggests may be more likely given that judges explicitly asked whether Prosperous Armenia would have entered parliament had those precincts not been nullified. The answer to that question is demonstrably yes, raising the question of why judges would pose a question to which they dislike the answer.

Most ominously, Hovik sees a 20 percent probability that the court will rule for new elections, framed perhaps as a necessity for achieving national solidarity. However, new elections under Pashinyan’s control could serve a far darker purpose: providing cover for banning opposition parties on grounds of vote-buying and subsequently holding elections with a truncated opposition. This scenario would leverage the existing narrative of opposition vote purchase to justify formal party exclusions. The opposition’s preparedness for a negative ruling remains unclear. Asbed and Hovik both emphasize the absence of visible contingency planning, raising the question of whether opposition parties have strategies for prolonged detention, capital controls, or escalation beyond court proceedings. With July 4 approaching, Armenia enters a period of maximum uncertainty where legal outcomes may matter less than the tactical decisions made in their aftermath.