The Central Electoral Commission has announced the final election results. According to the official figures, the Civil Contract party (CC) received 49.74% of the votes cast, enabling it to form a government on its own. Voter turnout stood at approximately 59% of all eligible voters. What conclusions can be drawn from these results?
The most important conclusion, in my view, is this: despite the unprecedented scale of the hybrid threats orchestrated by the Kremlin, the Armenian people expressed their will and elected their government. Through the exercise of popular sovereignty, voters endorsed an agenda centered on deepening democratic reforms, strengthening and consolidating state institutions, institutionalizing peace, eliminating the remaining vestiges of the former authoritarian regime, diversifying the economy, and advancing Armenia’s path toward European Union membership. This was precisely the platform that Civil Contract presented during its election campaign.
Prior to the elections, some argued that Civil Contract lacked a mandate to pursue its peace agenda, claiming that the mandate it had received in 2021 was fundamentally different—namely, to achieve the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh under the principle of “remedial secession.” These elections demonstrated that Civil Contract has now received a mandate to move forward with its current peace agenda. Moreover, the results also confirm the legitimacy of the measures already implemented within the framework of that agenda. Had the public disagreed with those policies, it would have rendered a different electoral verdict.
It should also be noted that although certain irregularities were reported, and the Central Electoral Commission’s decision not to hold repeat voting at three polling stations was regarded as controversial by many, one conclusion is clear according to both international and domestic election observation missions: the elections were not falsified, and the votes officially recorded for Civil Contract accurately reflect the will of the electorate. No election observation mission has claimed that even a single vote received by Civil Contract was fraudulent. The protocols from all 2,005 polling stations were signed by every member of the precinct election commissions, including representatives nominated by the two opposition alliances.
Nevertheless, some continue to argue that Civil Contract did not actually win because it failed to secure the support of an absolute majority of the electorate. This argument has no factual or legal basis.
Civil Contract received 726,819 votes, whereas the two opposition alliances that passed the electoral threshold received a combined total of 484,989 votes. In other words, Civil Contract received 241,830 more votes than both parliamentary opposition alliances combined. Not only did Civil Contract win the election, it did so by a substantial margin and, as noted above, secured the ability to form a government on its own.
According to the final results announced by the Central Electoral Commission, Civil Contract won 64 parliamentary seats, while the two opposition alliances together secured 41 seats.
Some argue that Civil Contract obtained such a large number of seats because Armenia’s electoral system redistributes the votes cast for parties that fail to cross the electoral threshold among those that do. While this mechanism does increase the number of seats allocated to the winning party, it also increases the parliamentary representation of every other party or alliance that passes the threshold.
Most importantly, even without this redistribution mechanism, Civil Contract still received nearly 50% of all votes cast, whereas the two opposition alliances that entered parliament together received only 33.19%.
Sometimes, another argument is advanced: that the majority of eligible voters did not vote for Civil Contract, which supposedly means that the public rejected the party, since approximately 40% of eligible voters did not participate in the election and only about half of those who did vote cast their ballots for Civil Contract.
First, we cannot conclude that those who did not participate in the election “rejected” Civil Contract. There may be various reasons for abstaining from voting, but one thing is clear: if non-participants had wanted to reject Civil Contract, they could have gone to the polls and voted against it in order to prevent its victory, especially given that the opposition forces were expected to receive a substantial number of votes and that their participation could have been decisive. At most, one may argue that they were indifferent as to who would ultimately win the election.
Moreover, if Civil Contract did not win, then who, according to the proponents of this argument, did? As already noted, Civil Contract received 241,830 more votes than the two opposition alliances that crossed the electoral threshold combined. Even if there had been no electoral threshold at all and every political force participating in the election had entered parliament, it is safe to assume that Civil Contract would still have formed the government on the basis of its electoral performance. The government might have taken the form of a coalition, for example with the pro-Western Republic Party. It should be recalled that the latter had publicly stated that it would support Civil Contract if necessary.
In any case, election results of this kind mean that there is a parliamentary majority capable of forming a government. Therefore, it cannot be argued that no one won the election, since the necessary majority exists to form a government and elect a prime minister. In other words, regardless of the specific electoral system in place, Civil Contract and its political agenda prevailed through the exercise of popular sovereignty and the free expression of the people’s will.
Finally, one interesting fact deserves attention. The nearly 50 percent secured by Civil Contract is an exceptional result by contemporary European standards. In parliamentary systems across
Europe, the winning party typically receives only 20–30 percent of the vote, which often leads to the formation of coalition governments. For example, Denmark’s Social Democratic Party, which won the 2026 election, received 21.8 percent of the vote. In the Netherlands, the Democrats 66 party emerged victorious in the 2025 elections with 16.9 percent. In Germany, the Christian Democratic Union won the 2025 elections with 22.6 percent of the vote.
We believe that coalition governments will eventually become a feature of Armenia’s political system as well. More broadly, Armenia needs a party system in which at least four of the five leading political forces are democratic parties whose combined electoral support consistently exceeds 60 percent. Only under such circumstances would the defeat of a governing party or the collapse of a ruling coalition not create a risk to democracy or to political and civil liberties.
Edgar Vardanyan
This article was produced by the Armenian Council Research Center with the support of the Yerevan Office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in the South Caucasus.
The views and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom or its staff.
