Armenian politics: a parliament whose size the vote decides

Why the Armenian parliament has no fixed size

Article 89 of the constitution gives a minimum and no maximum. The National Assembly "shall be composed of at least one hundred and one Deputies", it is elected by a proportional system, and the Electoral Code "shall guarantee formation of stable parliamentary majority". If no stable majority comes out of the count or out of coalition talks, a second round may be held, and new alliances may form between the two rounds.

The Electoral Code adds a guarantee pointing the other way: when a single party wins more than two thirds of the seats, extra seats are allotted to the other parties until they hold one third. The Inter-Parliamentary Union records the rule working in June 2021: the winning list crossed the line, two additional seats were allotted, and the chamber elected that month sat 107 members, four of them representatives of national minorities.

The result is a parliament whose headcount is an output of each election. The Inter-Parliamentary Union's series for the chamber reads as follows.

Before the 2015 referendum the chamber had 131 members serving five-year terms, 41 of them elected in single-seat constituencies and 90 from party lists, and the referendum abolished the constituencies. Seats are shared among lists that clear 5% of the vote, and blocs need 7%; 123 political parties were registered in January 2025.

Two rules decide who sits on those lists. Four seats are set aside for representatives of the Assyrian, Kurdish, Russian and Yazidi minorities, and the Inter-Parliamentary Union records that up to four minority representatives may be elected. Article 83.4 of the 2016 Electoral Code bars either sex from exceeding 70% of a list and requires both sexes in every group of three consecutive candidates. The chamber elected in June 2026 had 37 women among its 105 members in August 2026, or 35.2%, and an average age of 41.5.

How Armenia's referendums moved power to parliament

Armenia has changed its constitution by popular vote three times. The first text was adopted at referendum on 5 July 1995, and it was amended at referendum on 27 November 2005 and again on 6 December 2015. The National Assembly made a further amendment on its own on 22 June 2020. A set of amendments on the role of parliament proposed after the presidential election of 2003 was rejected at a referendum held that May, alongside the parliamentary vote.

The Inter-Parliamentary Union classifies the system from 2005 as presidential-parliamentary and from April 2018 as parliamentary, and the second date is the one that matters. The 2015 referendum stripped the president of the veto, made the office a post elected by parliament for seven years, barred re-election and barred the holder from party membership. The authority of the prime minister was strengthened in the same move, and it took effect in 2018 when the last directly elected president's second term ended.

Sceptics read the reform at the time as a way for the third president, Serzh Sargsyan, to stay in control by becoming prime minister once his second presidential term ran out in 2018. That reading was put to the test within weeks. In the spring of 2018 parliament elected Sargsyan prime minister despite opposition protests; after soldiers joined the protests on 23 April, he resigned, and in May 2018 parliament elected the opposition leader who had led the demonstrations. The office built by the 2015 text went to a person its drafters had not planned for.

Most of the constitution can now be changed only by the same route. Article 202 lists the chapters and articles that may be amended only at referendum, among them the whole of the first three chapters, the article defining parliament's functions and the articles on the prime minister's election and on non-confidence. The National Assembly needs two thirds of all deputies to put such a draft to the vote, and an act passes if more than half of those taking part, and at least a quarter of the electorate, vote for it. The remaining articles may be amended by two thirds of the deputies with no referendum at all.

The two-thirds threshold and the two-thirds ceiling in the Electoral Code meet here. Two thirds of 107 is 71.3, so the list that won 71 seats in June 2021 could not send a constitutional draft to referendum on its own votes.

How an Armenian prime minister is chosen and removed

Article 149 makes the prime minister the majority's candidate: it obliges the president to appoint that candidate immediately after a newly elected chamber first sits, and to appoint whoever parliament elects if the office falls vacant during a term. The government, according to the prime minister's office, is "the supreme body of the executive power" and develops and implements both the domestic and the foreign policy of the state.

A vacancy runs to a fixed timetable. Factions have seven days to nominate candidates, and parliament elects by a majority of all deputies in a roll-call vote. If that fails, a second vote follows seven days later among candidates nominated by at least a third of the deputies. If that fails as well, the National Assembly is dissolved by operation of law and the country goes to an early election.

Removal is harder than election. Under Article 115 a motion of no confidence needs the signatures of a third of the deputies and must name a replacement prime minister in the same text. It cannot be tabled in a prime minister's first year, a failed motion cannot be repeated for six months, and none can be tabled or debated under martial law or a state of emergency. The vote comes between forty-eight and seventy-two hours after the motion is filed, by roll call, and if it passes the prime minister is treated as having resigned and the named candidate takes over.

The constructive motion means parliament cannot bring down a government without agreeing on the next one, and it pairs with the stable-majority rule in Article 89. The one route out that the text leaves open to a sitting prime minister is resignation, and it was used in April 2021, when the prime minister resigned formally to trigger the early election held that June and stayed on as acting prime minister until it was over.

What the Armenian president still holds

The president is elected by parliament for one term of seven years, and the rounds are designed to push the chamber towards a broad choice. A candidate needs three quarters of all deputies in the first round and three fifths in the second; only in the third round, between the two leading candidates, does a majority of all deputies suffice. A quarter of the deputies may nominate. The candidate must be at least forty, must have held only Armenian citizenship and lived in Armenia for the preceding six years, and must speak Armenian.

The president signs laws within twenty-one days or sends them to the Constitutional Court; if the court finds a law compatible, the president must sign within five days, and if the president does neither, the chairperson of the National Assembly signs instead. The president concludes treaties and appoints the supreme command of the armed forces on the government's or the prime minister's recommendation, grants pardons, and recommends three of the nine constitutional judges.

The first president chosen under these rules was Armen Sarkissian, elected by parliament in March 2018. He resigned on 23 January 2022, stating that the constitution no longer gave the president sufficient powers or influence. His successor was elected on 3 March 2022 in the second round of the parliamentary vote. Removal requires two thirds of all deputies, acting on an opinion of the Constitutional Court.

Why Armenian elections kept ending in the streets

International observers questioned the fairness of Armenia's parliamentary and presidential elections and its constitutional referendums between 1995 and 2018, citing polling deficiencies, a poorly cooperating electoral commission and badly kept electoral lists. In those years one president was forced out by his own ministers, one prime minister by crowds and soldiers, and one presidential result ended with deaths in the capital.

How presidents fell and held on

Levon Ter-Petrosyan was elected the first president on 16 October 1991 with 83% of the vote and re-elected on 22 September 1996 amid allegations of fraud. He was forced out in February 1998 by his own ministers after backing a phased Karabakh settlement proposed by international mediators in September 1997. On 27 October 1999 gunmen entered the chamber during a sitting and killed Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan, Speaker Karen Demirchyan and six other officials.

Robert Kocharyan's re-election in 2003 was followed by allegations of ballot-rigging and by demonstrations of tens of thousands; the Constitutional Court upheld the result and recommended a referendum of confidence within a year. The election of 19 February 2008 gave Serzh Sargsyan about 53% and Ter-Petrosyan 21.5%. Ter-Petrosyan's supporters camped in Yerevan from 20 February, and on 1 March the police dispersed them, a state of emergency brought the army into the capital, and ten people died, policemen among them. Mass arrests and a de facto ban on anti-government protest followed.

How the crises ran under the new text

After the ceasefire of 10 November 2020, which handed the territories around Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan, hundreds of protesters stormed the parliament building in Yerevan. On 25 February 2021 the military called on the prime minister to resign; he described the declaration as a coup attempt and dismissed the Chief of the General Staff, Onik Gasparyan.

The crisis was settled by the procedure the 2015 text provides. The prime minister resigned in April to allow an early election, and the vote of June 2021 returned a majority of 71 against 29 seats for the Armenia Alliance, headed by Kocharyan, and 7 for the I Have Honor Alliance, formed around Serzh Sargsyan.

Who appoints Armenia's judges and watchdogs

The 2015 text moves appointment to parliament and raises the vote needed. The nine judges of the Constitutional Court are elected by the National Assembly for single terms of twelve years by three fifths of all deputies, three on the president's recommendation, three on the government's and three on that of the General Assembly of Judges. The Supreme Judicial Council, which guarantees the independence of the courts, has ten members: five elected by the judges and five by parliament, again by three fifths, for five years with no second term.

The same three-fifths vote fills the other offices the constitution sets apart from the three branches. The prosecutor general, the Human Rights Defender, the Central Electoral Commission, the Audit Chamber, the Television and Radio Commission and the chairperson of the Central Bank are all elected by three fifths of the deputies for six years, most of them for no more than two consecutive terms.

The Electoral Code's two-thirds ceiling keeps a single list from amending the constitution alone, and three fifths lies below it. The majority elected in June 2021 held 71 of 107 seats, about 66%, which clears three fifths: a list of that size can fill the courts' share of seats and every oversight body without an opposition vote.

Transparency International scored Armenia 47 out of 100 in its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2024. It describes the reform since 2018 as gradual and names judicial independence and checks and balances as the steps that remain.

How the Karabakh peace talks reached the constitution

The dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, which the history article follows from 1988, has now entered Armenian politics as a constitutional question. The preamble of the text adopted in 2015 takes as its basis "the nation-wide objectives enshrined in the Declaration on the Independence of Armenia". Negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan began in 2024; in April that year the two moved to delineate their border, and Armenia agreed to hand over four abandoned Azerbaijani villages it had held since the first war.

In March 2025 negotiators announced that a peace deal had been reached. According to Britannica, Azerbaijan refused to sign until Armenia removed from its constitution what Azerbaijan considers implicit references to Armenian territorial claims over Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Armenian government pushed for a constitutional referendum to take place in 2027. This catalogue records Azerbaijan's position and the Armenian government's response and takes no position on the reading of the preamble.

The preamble sits in the part of the text Article 202 reserves for referendum. A change to it therefore needs two thirds of the deputies to reach the ballot and then more than half of those voting, with at least a quarter of all voters in favour. Both states have meanwhile filed cases at the International Court of Justice accusing the other of ethnic cleansing.

Which blocs Armenia stands with after Karabakh

Armenia joined the post-Soviet security and economic bodies early and has stayed in most of them. It co-founded the Commonwealth of Independent States on 21 December 1991, in force for Armenia from 18 February 1992, and joined the United Nations on 2 March 1992. Its record lists the Collective Security Treaty Organization from 1994, the Council of Europe from 25 January 2001, the World Trade Organization from 5 February 2003 and the Eurasian Economic Union from 10 October 2014.

The 2020 ceasefire was brokered by Russia and placed Russian peacekeepers in Karabakh for five years; Britannica records that the Lachin Corridor was blockaded in December 2022 with little Russian intervention, and that after the Azerbaijani offensive of September 2023 more than 100,000 of about 120,000 Karabakh Armenians had fled by October. Armenia suspended its membership of the Collective Security Treaty Organization in June 2024, and in February 2025 it ratified a bill on accession to the European Union.

The economic side has moved more slowly. Armenia's trade with the Eurasian Economic Union exceeded US$8 billion in 2025, and its exports to the union's members came to more than US$3.2 billion, according to figures published by Armenpress in March 2026. The World Bank's July 2026 update reports that Russia had been widening a ban on Armenian agricultural and food products since late April 2026, that exports to Russia fell 15% year on year in May 2026, and that the government had introduced subsidies to help exporters reach other markets, the European Union among them. In the same month about 61% of net money transfers into Armenia came from Russia.

Turkey and Azerbaijan closed theirs after the first Karabakh war and kept them closed; Turkey and Armenia signed protocols on establishing diplomatic relations on 10 October 2009, and Armenia's president recognised the existing Turkish border in them; the crossings stayed shut.