page_title: Nikol Pashinyan
section_title: Civil Contract and Way Out Alliance
hierarchical_section_title: Nikol Pashinyan / Civil Contract and Way Out Alliance
caption_attribution_description: English: Nikol Pashinyan in April 2014
context_page_description: Nikol Pashinyan is an Armenian politician serving as Prime Minister of Armenia since 8 May 2018. He 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 from 1999 to 2012. Sympathetic to Armenia'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 1 March 2008 resulting in the deaths of 10 people.
context_section_description: Following a break with Ter-Petrosyan and the ANC, Pashinyan founded a political group called "Civil Contract" on December 9, 2013. Pashinyan, who was one of the 7 members of its governing body, declared that they will seek to remove Serzh Sargsyan from power and hold free and fair elections. Other members of the board were Sasun Mikayelyan, a former MP and a Karabakh war veteran, and 5 politically unaffiliated activists. Both Pashinyan and Mikayelyan were critical of potential cooperation with Tsarukyan.
  Pashinyan increasingly distanced himself from Ter-Petrosyan and criticized him for promising his supporters snap elections also taking a responsibility for himself. In October 2014 he criticized the trio of ANC, Prosperous Armenia and Heritage parties for their alleged power-sharing deals with Serzh Sargsyan instead of forcing him to resign. Pashinyan criticized the ambiguity of their demands. He also accused them in monopolization of the political field in Armenia. In November 2014 he announced about his plans to start an impeachment process against Serzh Sargsyan to contribute to the "fulfillment of the trio’s pledge to end the ‘heated political autumn’ with regime change." Besides Pashinyan, two MPs from Heritage party, Alexander Arzumanyan and Zaruhi Postanjyan, signed the draft law.
caption: Pashinyan in 2014
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