“There is a future,” shouts Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia’s prime minister, as he walks with a crowd of supporters in Ararat, a small town outside the capital Yerevan.
Three years since he came to power in Armenia in a peaceful revolution, this is Pashinyan’s slogan for a country emerging from the trauma of last year’s brutal war with Azerbaijan which ended in humiliating defeat.
In 2018, he walked through most of the country on foot on his way to Yerevan, building momentum to successfully challenge an entrenched regime. But this weekend, the country will vote in a highly charged parliamentary election that is, in effect, a referendum on three years of Pashinyan’s reforms which were stymied by conflict.
