Nikol Pashinyan rushed to congratulate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on winning reelection in a weekend run-off vote.
“Congratulations to President Erdogan on his re-election,” Pashinyan tweeted on Sunday evening shortly after the release of official election results that showed Erdogan winning over 52 percent of the vote.
“Looking forward to continuing working together towards full normalization of relations between our countries,” he wrote.
Turkey has for decades made the opening of the border and the establishment of diplomatic relations with Armenia conditional on an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace deal acceptable to Azerbaijan. Turkish leaders have repeatedly reaffirmed this precondition since the start of the normalization talks with Yerevan in January 2022.
Tensions between the two neighboring states were reignited in late April after municipal authorities in Yerevan unveiled a monument dedicated to Armenians who had assassinated masterminds and perpetrators of the 1915 Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey.
The Turkish government strongly condemned the move and banned Armenian airlines from flying over Turkey to third countries. Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu threatened last week “new measures” against Armenia if the monument is not removed soon.
Pashinyan described the erection of the monument as a “wrong decision” when he spoke to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service earlier this month. He claimed that his government had nothing to do with it.
During the presidential election campaign, Erdogan and his political allies repeatedly touted Turkey’s decisive military assistance to Azerbaijan provided during the 2020 war with Armenia. They accused Erdogan’s main challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, of opposing Ankara’s political and military alliance with Baku.
Source: Azatutyun.am
