Serzh Sargsyan
Serzh Sargsyan changed the constitution so he could keep power and lost it in eleven days. He was born in Stepanakert in Nagorno-Karabakh, and his authority came from the war there: he ran the Karabakh self-defence committee from 1989 and was one of the commanders of a conflict Armenians won and did not expect to lose again. That generation - the Karabakh clan - supplied Armenia's leadership for twenty years, and he was defence minister, security minister, prime minister and then president from 2008. The election that brought him in was followed by protests in which ten people were killed, which was never satisfactorily investigated. He served the two terms the constitution allowed. In 2015 he put through a referendum turning Armenia into a parliamentary republic, saying plainly at the time that he would not seek to lead the country afterwards. In April 2018 his party made him prime minister, which was now the office with the power. Nikol Pashinyan, an opposition journalist, had already begun walking across the country; the demonstrations grew daily, soldiers joined them, and nobody was killed. He resigned on 23 April with a statement that Pashinyan had been right and he had been wrong. It is one of the few revolutions of the period that produced neither bloodshed nor a restoration. He was later charged with corruption over a diesel subsidy scheme, in a prosecution his supporters read as the settling of accounts that follows any change of government in the region. The government the protests produced inherited the Karabakh question and lost the war of 2020, and the enclave he had fought for was emptied of Armenians in 2023 - so the cause that made his career outlived his career by five years and then ended.
- Lived: 1954 CE – ?
- Nationality: Armenian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
