Vote-buying created a threat of war, PM says of opposition

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has accused opposition forces of creating a threat of war through vote-buying.

Speaking during a government question-and-answer session in parliament, Pashinyan recalled that during the election campaign the Civil Contract party had urged citizens to stand for peace. According to the prime minister, the citizens of Armenia, through the election results, stood for the peace agenda.

“Our assessment is unequivocal: the citizens of the Republic of Armenia have stood for peace,” Pashinyan said.

He argued that the election results should also be viewed from the perspective of external perceptions. According to the prime minister, there was a risk of creating the impression that hundreds of thousands of Armenians supported forces advocating a revision of the peace agenda or the continuation of past conflict-related policies.

Pashinyan said such a perception could have significantly escalated the military and political situation in the region.

“If an impression is created that there are 500,000 people in Armenia who believe we should continue the Karabakh movement or pursue a ‘sea-to-sea Armenia’ agenda, that would seriously aggravate the military-political situation in Armenia,” he said.

The prime minister argued that no such public sentiment exists and alleged that vote-buying during the election campaign had been carried out with the assistance of external actors interested in destabilising the region.

“We know the reality. We know there are no such people. Vote-buying was carried out with the assistance of external forces that are interested in seeing the region explode,” Pashinyan said.

According to the prime minister, this was one of the reasons why it was important to quickly restore momentum to the peace process after the elections.

In that context, he referred to the recent meeting between Secretary of Armenia’s Security Council Armen Grigoryan and Azerbaijani presidential aide Hikmet Hajiyev.

“Through vote-buying, they created a direct threat of war. The need to organise a meeting in that format was precisely to manage that threat,” Pashinyan said.