By Andranik Aboyan
The Civil Contract Party, once heralded as the vanguard of Armenia’s “velvet revolution,” now appears more preoccupied with preserving its hegemony than fulfilling its promises of creating an open, fair democratic society it campaigned on in 2018. As its national support base erodes—a predictable outcome of post-war disillusionment and economic contradictions—the party has resorted to a familiar stratagem: leveraging state apparatuses to neutralize local opposition, all while cloaking its maneuvers in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “rule of law.”
The case of Mamikon Aslanyan, the former Vanadzor mayor sentenced to prison on dubious corruption charges after defeating Civil Contract in 2021, is emblematic of this dialectical shift from popular mandate to coercive control. But Aslanyan is not an isolated casualty. In Gyumri, another opposition stronghold, Mayor Samvel Balasanyan faced a barrage of legal investigations shortly after his 2021 re-election, with prosecutors suddenly discovering “irregularities” in municipal contracts dating back years. The timing, critics note, bore the unmistakable scent of political theater—a farcical repeat of Vanadzor’s script, where the state’s legal machinery pivots from lethargy to hypervigilance the moment local elections defy Yerevan’s preferences.
Civil Contract, having transitioned from insurgent reformers to defenders of the status quo, now deploys juridical processes not to resolve contradictions but to suppress them. The party’s commitment to “transparency” is so rigorous that it selectively excavates alleged misconduct only among rivals—a curious approach for a movement once hailed for dismantling oligarchic networks. One might point out that their fervor for legal accountability rivals their enthusiasm for losing land: both are pursued with grim determination, albeit with markedly different success rates.
In a twist worthy of Kafka, the party’s legal maneuvers often leave opposition figures navigating a labyrinth of accusations—where exoneration is as elusive as a dialectical synthesis in a thesis-antithesis stalemate. Take the case of Artur Vanetsyan, former head of the National Security Service, whose post-2019 fall from grace involved a litany of charges (later dropped) that coincidentally aligned with his political critiques. The pattern is clear: the closer one drifts to challenging Civil Contract’s monopoly on power, the heavier the gravitational pull of the judiciary becomes.
Even local councils are not spared this bureaucratic absurdism. In recent years, multiple municipalities have seen pro-government judges suspend mayoral elections indefinitely—citing “procedural irregularities” that, curiously, only surface when opposition blocs prevail. It’s as if Armenia’s legal code contains a hidden clause: “Thou shalt not govern unless Yerevan approves.” One can almost admire the party’s ideological flexibility, seamlessly blending democratic aesthetics with authoritarian scaffolding—a feat that would make even Louis Bonaparte blush.
To critique Civil Contract is not to deny the necessity of combating corruption. But when anti-graft campaigns morph into political purges, the line between justice and farce blurs. The party’s approach makes me recall a quip about history repeating itself “first as tragedy, then as farce”—except here, the farce is ongoing, and the tragedy is Armenia’s future.
As the people of Vanadzor and Gyumri might attest, the ruling party’s “revolution” now resembles less a liberation struggle than a game of Calvinball, where the rules are rewritten mid-match to ensure the house always wins. For a party that rose to power decrying elite capture, Civil Contract’s metamorphosis into Armenia’s new bureaucratic elite offers a rich irony—one that even dear old Hegel might struggle to reconcile.
In the end, the party’s greatest achievement may be its unintended contribution to a specific framework of understanding history: a case study in how revolutionary movements, absent class consciousness, inevitably replicate the structures they sought to dismantle. All that’s missing is a monument to irony in Republic Square—preferably built on contested municipal land.
