Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia\u2019s prime minister, is one of the most consequential political figures to emerge in the South Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a region shaped by unresolved conflicts, fragile states, and leaders often locked into nationalist posturing, Pashinyan has achieved something rare: he has turned a military and territorial defeat against Azerbaijan into a political, institutional, and strategic victory at home. His real achievement lies in transforming a collective trauma into a new vision for Armenia\u2019s future.<\/p>\n
The war lost to Azerbaijan was not simply a battlefield defeat \u2013 the loss of control over Karabakh and the seven surrounding districts occupied since the early 1990s, when Armenia had prevailed over Baku in the first war; it also meant the forced displacement of the Armenian population of Artsakh (the Armenian name for Karabakh), turning an entire community into refugees. More profoundly, it shattered the very foundations of Armenia\u2019s political identity.<\/p>\n
Since independence, a central pillar of Armenia\u2019s national project had been built around Karabakh: framed as a historic achievement, a symbol of redemption, and a cornerstone of national security. For more than two decades, this narrative was cultivated and entrenched by war-born political elites, who instrumentalized the Karabakh issue as a source of power, identity mobilization, and domestic legitimacy \u2013 often at the expense of structural reform and a clear-eyed reckoning with shifting regional geopolitics. The defeat of 2020 therefore became an existential crisis: not only the loss of territory and lives, but the collapse of an entire national myth. It is within this political, symbolic, and moral vacuum that Pashinyan\u2019s leadership must be understood \u2013 a leader forced to govern loss while it was still raw and bleeding.<\/p>\n
The end of Armenian control over Karabakh and the mass displacement of its population could have fatally destabilized the state and its political system. Pashinyan instead chose a different path: to use that trauma as a breaking point with the past and as an opportunity to radically rethink Armenia\u2019s place in the world. That choice set in motion a difficult and fragile process of regional engagement with Azerbaijan and Turkey, based on the once-taboo idea of normalizing relations and reopening borders. At the same time, it created space for a gradual loosening of Armenia\u2019s long-standing dependence on Russia, which for decades had constrained Armenian sovereignty through military, economic, and political leverage. Within this new strategic framework, Yerevan was also able to revive its European trajectory, abruptly derailed in 2013, when Armenia, under pressure from Moscow, abandoned plans to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union. Simultaneously, together with Azerbaijan, Pashinyan helped bring the United States back into the South Caucasus after a gradual disengagement that had begun during the Obama years \u2013 both as a mediator with Baku and as the main promoter of the regional corridor linking Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, opening a new route toward Central Asia.<\/p>\n
Pashinyan\u2019s rise, however, began long before the war. In the 1990s, he emerged as a young student journalist known for his uncompromising criticism of corruption and the post-Soviet elite. He founded Armenia\u2019s leading opposition daily newspaper and was briefly imprisoned in 2009 for his role in street protests. In April 2018, he led ten days of peaceful demonstrations against Serzh Sargsyan, who had been appointed prime minister after serving a decade as president. With his black cap, camouflage T-shirt, and bandaged hand \u2013 reportedly injured on barbed wire \u2013 Pashinyan embodied a radical break from the country\u2019s traditional political aesthetic. The so-called Velvet Revolution forced Sargsyan\u2019s resignation and, as one Armenian journalist put it, transformed Pashinyan \u201cfrom a lonely Don Quixote into a kind of militant Saint Nicholas, capable of \u2018saving\u2019 Armenia from a corrupt regime.\u201d This political rupture was accompanied by a direct challenge to one of the most untouchable institutions in Armenian society: the Apostolic Church. Pashinyan remains the only leader in the Caucasus to have openly criticized a Church widely seen as corrupt, socially regressive, and deeply intertwined with political power, further reinforcing his image as a break from the post-Soviet order.<\/p>\n
On a personal level, Pashinyan deliberately cultivates an image far removed from the rituals of traditional authority. A former journalist, he maintains habits that anchor him in everyday life: he plays the drums \u2013 recently performing at a public concert \u2013 and is an enthusiastic cyclist, often riding a bicycle even during official visits abroad and sharing these moments on social media. This informal register helps build a direct relationship with public opinion and humanizes a leadership subjected to extraordinary pressure.<\/p>\n
It is precisely this pressure that led him to accept Donald Trump\u2019s invitation to join the so-called Board of Peace, a body largely composed of authoritarian leaders \u2013 an initiative that reflects the ambiguities of the international environment in which Armenia is now forced to operate. But Pashinyan is also this: a blend of pragmatism and a willingness to pay a high personal price for his country. It is the same sense of sacrifice that once led him to declare himself ready to exchange his son Ashot for Armenian prisoners of war, and that today makes him willing to sacrifice his own image in order to defend national interests. After all, Armenia\u2019s destiny has always been to survive in a world governed by bullies. Pashinyan\u2019s political and personal portrait belongs precisely here: in the space of a leader who chose to govern defeat rather than deny it, and to turn it into the foundation of a new national narrative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia\u2019s prime minister, is one of the most consequential political figures to emerge in the South Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a region shaped by unresolved conflicts, fragile states, and leaders often locked into nationalist posturing, Pashinyan has achieved something rare: he has turned a military and territorial defeat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6606,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":142,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6622"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6774,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6622\/revisions\/6774"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}