Arrested Four Days Before the Vote: The Stepanavan Playbook

Hovik details what happened in Stepanavan, a small community of about 12,000 people where Civil Contract has governed since 2021. This year Strong Armenia, the party linked to Samvel Karapetyan, decided to contest the race and fielded a candidate alongside four other parties, five parties in total. For Pashinyan, Hovik argues, that was one too many. Four days before the elections, authorities arrested 14 people from Strong Armenia. The following day, they arrested 10 more, roughly 24 in total, including campaign staff, the mayoral candidate, and city council candidates known locally as the avagani or Council of Elders.

The clip is clip-worthy because it compresses a clear cause-and-effect into one minute: an opposition party enters a race it might compete in, and its entire campaign is hamstrung by mass arrests in the final days. Hovik frames this as the power of administrative resources and clan voting, the same machinery that delivered Civil Contract 78 percent in earlier Stepanavan voting on low turnout.

This connects to the episode’s recurring theme of political prisoners in Armenia and the tactics the hosts say were also used in the June parliamentary elections, when hundreds of Strong Armenia supporters and campaign members were arrested. The government alleged vote bribery based on secret cameras placed in campaign headquarters, while Strong Armenia maintains any exchange of money was for legitimate campaign activity. For an audience tracking human rights and the 2026 Armenian parliamentary election environment, the Stepanavan arrests are a sharp case study in how competitive races can be shut down before a single ballot is counted, raising questions about fairness, intimidation, and the independence of the police and judiciary under Pashinyan.