TOPIC OF THE WEEK: Opposition cross-pollination in the South Caucasus—Armenia and Georgia exchanging lessons from the political battlefield

CAUCASUS / CENTRAL ASIA - Report 25 Jun 2026 by Ivan Tchakarov

Two key events have taken place in the Armenian and Georgian political fields these days.

In the former, I see no surprises coming from tomorrow's Constitutional Court decision on the validity of the elections as the Court will rubber stamp Pashinyan's victory. The really interesting debate these days is about the opposition's Hamletian dilemma of whether or not to take its seats in the National Assembly. While some argue that doing this would only legitimize Civil Contract's win, I think the more likely outcome would be to accept allocated seats as a way of participating in Parliamentary procedures and, where possible, create hurdles for Civil Contract. That decision may be directly affected by observing the Georgian opposition's experience of boycotting the Parliament, which demonstrates that such an approach delivers few, if any, advantages.

In the latter, Levan Khabeishvili's striking recent Facebook post (Levan is head of the opposition United National Movement's political council) has, much to my surprise, attracted virtually no attention by analysts and commentators. He has proposed a five-point agreement that the opposition needs to reach before considering integration with Europe and returning to the West. In particular, his strongly conservative and pragmatic take, both in domestic and foreign affairs, is exactly the kind of successful approach that Georgian Dream has been so skillfully utilizing in recent years to stay in power. If the Georgian opposition starts pursing a "rational state policy towards Russia" in foreign policy while affirming traditional values domestically via, for example, declaring that "there will never be same-sex marriages in Georgia", it can take the political battle straight into Georgian Dream's realm in a successful way. I am not sure to what extent this unifying call will fall on receptive ears in the rest of the opposition, but, if it does, then the 2028 elections may become harder for Georgian Dream to win.

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