Armenia's Velvet Revolution
Armenia changed its government in 2018 by a month of demonstrations in which nobody was killed. Serzh Sargsyan had been president for the two terms the constitution allowed, had put through a constitutional change in 2015 turning Armenia into a parliamentary republic, and had said explicitly that he would not seek the prime ministership under it. In April 2018 he sought it, and parliament gave it to him. Nikol Pashinyan, an opposition member of parliament and a former newspaper editor who had been imprisoned after the protests of 2008, set out from Gyumri on foot with a handful of supporters and walked some 200 kilometres to Yerevan over two weeks, gathering people as he went. The tactics were deliberately disruptive and deliberately non-violent: blocked intersections rather than a single rally, small groups everywhere at once, and an insistence on not damaging anything. Soldiers who joined in uniform were told to go back. Sargsyan met Pashinyan on 22 April, told him he did not understand the situation, and walked out; he resigned the next day saying that he had been wrong. Parliament elected Pashinyan on 8 May after a first vote failed and the country stopped working for a day. His government's largest inheritance was Nagorno-Karabakh, and the war of 2020 lost most of it in six weeks, and the remainder was taken in 2023. He nonetheless won the election called after that defeat. The revolution is one of very few in the post-Soviet space to change a government without deaths, foreign sponsorship or a disputed count. What it demonstrated is also its limit: a movement can remove a leader and cannot conjure a solution to a thirty-year territorial war.
- Year: 2018 CE
- Category: Political
