Pashinyan Has No Public Support Left

When Asbed notes that Pashinyan has been threatening street action against the opposition, Aghajanian cuts in with a flat verdict: he has no power for that. Her reasoning is direct. If Pashinyan still commanded real public support, she argues, he would already have used it. Instead she describes his recent results, in the June elections and the local elections, as products of fear, pressure, and administrative resource rather than genuine backing.

She pushes the point further by naming the limits of coercion. Fear and administrative resource, she says, cannot force people to support what she calls Aliyev’s constitution or to accept action against the Armenian Church. That is why, in her reading, the government is unwilling to publicize the constitutional text or open it to the public discussion the law requires. The argument links voter behavior to the deeper legitimacy problem she sees at the center of the ruling party.

This presents a clean, confident rebuttal to Pashinyan’s own rhetoric about mobilizing the street, the same tactic associated with the so-called Velvet Revolution that brought him to power in 2018, which critics describe as a color revolution. Aghajanian flips that history against him, suggesting the well of popular mobilization has run dry. For audiences following Armenian politics and the constitutional standoff, it compresses a contested but consequential claim into a short, quotable exchange about where real public sentiment now lies.