Nikol Pashinyan
Monday, July 15, 2019He is a former journalist and editor. A prominent journalist, Pashinyan first founded his own newspaper in 1998 which was shut down a year later. He was sentenced for one year for defamation against then Minister of National Security Serzh Sargsyan. He edited Haykakan Zhamanak (Armenian Times) from 1999 to 2012. Sympathetic to Armenian's first president Levon Ter-Petrosyan, he was highly critical of second president Robert Kocharyan, Defense Minister Serzh Sargsyan, and their allied oligarchs. Pashinyan led a minor opposition party in the 2007 parliamentary election, garnering 1.3% of the vote. He was an outspoken supporter of Ter-Petrosyan when the latter made a political comeback prior to the 2008 presidential election. Ter-Petrosyan was defeated by Serzh Sargsyan in an election marred with widespread vote fraud and violence. Noted for his fiery speeches, Pashinyan had a significant role in the post-election protests which were violently put down by government forces on March 1, 2008, resulting in the deaths of 10 people. Pashinyan, blamed for "organizing mass disorders," went into hiding, only to re-emerge in mid-2009. He has controversially sentenced to seven years in prison; a move that was widely seen a politically motivated. He was released in May 2011 as part of a general amnesty. He was elected to parliament from Ter-Petrosian's broad opposition coalition, the Armenian National Congress, in 2012.
He later broke from Ter-Petrosyan on political grounds, establishing the party Civil Contract. Along with two other opposition parties, Pashinyan formed the Way Out alliance which garnered almost 8% of the vote in the 2017 parliamentary election. He was the leader of the 2018 Armenian revolution which forced Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan and his government to resign. On 1 May 2018, he failed to gain enough votes from the Parliament to become the Prime Minister himself but was elected in the second vote on 8 May.[1]