YEREVAN
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan will officially resign sometime during the last 10 days of April, a step that is necessary to hold planned June 20 early parliamentary elections.
Pashinyan announced the largely formalistic move in parliament during a Q&A session. The move is required by law in advance of parliamentary polls.
The prime minister noted he would be formally nominated as a candidate for the same post by his ‘’My Step’’ bloc, which holds a majority in the body.
Once Pashinyan officially resigns, the National Assembly will be considered dissolved until the June vote.
The snap poll was agreed only after months of street protests and political disorder following Armenia’s effective capitulation to Azerbaijan in last year’s decisive, 44-day blitzkrieg by Baku. Azerbaijan took back seven regions that Armenian forces had occupied since the early 1990s. It also lost the historic, strategic city of Shusha inside the formerly Soviet autonomous district of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Pashinyan says Armenia had no choice but to agree to the Russian-brokered truce or face the prospect that the smaller parts of Nagorno-Karabakh still held by ethnic Armenian separatists might be lost as well.
But detractors nonetheless blamed him for the battlefield humiliation and demanded he quit.
However, Pashinyan appears to be in a commanding position in the run-up to the elections, with polls showing his bloc with a huge lead over a few mostly tiny, ultra-nationalist parties.
He also gave a stern warning during the parliament session that any forces which tried to take advantage of the pre-election period by sowing disorder would be facing “political suicide”.
Most of those polled say their main worries are the sorry state of the Armenian economy, battered by the 30-year conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, corruption, and living standards.
Pashinyan swept to power in 2018 directly due to the extreme unpopularity of the government of the time, which was mired in corruption scandals and had very little public support.