Pashinyan Floats Snap Elections, Opposition Says Give Us a Date

Asbed sets up one of the episode’s central political threads: Ilham Aliyev has been sending signals and applying pressure on Pashinyan to deliver what he promised after remaining in power past June 7, and one of the main demands is a change to the Armenian constitution. Pashinyan failed to win a majority of the popular vote in June and, Asbed argues, secured only a technical parliamentary majority through fraud, leaving him unable to change the constitution democratically.

The moment is compelling because it links external pressure from Azerbaijan directly to Armenia’s internal constitutional fight. The parliamentary opposition, Strong Armenia and the Armenia Alliance (Hayastan Dashinq), is described as dead set against a referendum to rewrite the constitution to Aliyev’s specifications, while Pashinyan is equally determined to make it happen. During a press conference, Pashinyan said he would try to convince opposition MPs, which prompts Hovik’s dark aside about what convincing might mean.

This connects to the episode’s later discussion of a possible snap election, in which Pashinyan would resign and his party would decline to re-elect him to trigger a new vote, mirroring 2021. The hosts note that Narek Karapetyan, leader of Strong Armenia, responded that the opposition is ready and simply wants a date. For viewers tracking the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process and the 2026 Armenian parliamentary election, this segment frames the stakes clearly: a constitutional change demanded from outside, a government without the democratic numbers to deliver it, and the prospect of yet another engineered election to force the outcome.