“I’m asking you a simple question: Do you have any responsibility towards the LGBT community?” This was one of many inflammatory questions addressed to Armenia’s acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan during a historic televised debate this week ahead of Sunday’s parliamentary elections. Pashinyan and Vigen Sargsyan, the first deputy president of the former ruling Republican Party of Armenia (RPA), engaged in a vitriolic exchange about national values.
The conversation touches on one of the election’s hot-button issues: gender. The term “gender” does not refer to an identity marker, but rather acts as a dog whistle for anything that falls outside of gender norms. The prospect of liberalising gender norms, which for Armenia’s militaristic and traditionalist culture is seen as an existential threat, has caused some hand-wringing in the lead up to elections. A homophobic attack that left nine people injured in August and draft legislation to ban “homsexual propaganda”, put forward by the RPA, are but a few of the events that have catapulted the issue to the forefront of the political conversation.
