Opinion | Why Is the Opposition Once Again Trying to Stir Political Tensions Around the Church?

The inaugural session of Armenia’s Ninth National Assembly began with what, at first glance, appeared to be a purely ceremonial issue: the uproar over the absence of Catholicos of All Armenians Garegin II. Opposition representatives turned the Catholicos’s absence from the Assembly’s inaugural session into a political showdown, shifting the issue from the realm of ceremony and protocol into that of political confrontation.

Armenia is not a theocracy. The functioning of the National Assembly, or of any other state institution, is not contingent upon the mandatory presence or blessing of the Catholicos of All Armenians. Armenia’s state institutions operate in accordance with the Constitution and the law, not according to ecclesiastical ceremony. It is therefore entirely natural to ask why the opposition chose to bring this issue to the forefront with such an uproar on the very first sitting of the Ninth National Assembly.

Like other individuals holding prominent state or public positions, the Catholicos may of course be invited to various state occasions. But such an invitation cannot be regarded as an automatic privilege arising from the office itself, let alone as a categorical requirement of state protocol. First and foremost, it is a matter of the public respect and authority enjoyed by the individual. Vazgen I, for example, particularly during the early years of Armenia’s independence, enjoyed precisely this kind of authority. There was never any need to justify his presence at events of national significance through official protocol, because his standing did not derive from his title. It was earned through his spiritual and public service.

The case of Garegin II is entirely different. Over more than a quarter-century in office, his tenure has been marked not by the accumulation of public authority, but by its steady erosion – from internal church scandals and controversial reports concerning wealth to conspicuous instances of involvement in political processes, as well as troubling ties with Russian political circles. Before equating Garegin II’s absence from Armenia’s parliament with a national tragedy, it may therefore be worth asking a more fundamental question: whose presence, exactly, are they so insistently demanding – and why?

This is a clergyman who, first and foremost, should answer to his own flock for the many questions that have accumulated within the church he leads. In recent years, Garegin II has effectively found himself at the center of Armenia’s domestic political struggle, owing to his politically charged statements and his openly anti-government stance. There are also a number of questions concerning his and his brother Archbishop Ezras Nersissian’s relations with the Russian authorities and the Russian Orthodox Church that have long required public clarification. These include questions surrounding Ezras Nersissian’s reported past as an agent of the Soviet KGB, based on information made public by Armenia’s National Security Service.

These questions become all the more relevant at a time when attempts are being made to turn the language of “defending Christian values” into a political agenda in Armenia. Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, with whom Garegin II maintains close relations, has presented Russia’s development of nuclear weapons as “God’s blessing.” In light of such statements, it is entirely legitimate to ask what shared values underpin these relations and to what extent they fit within the political rhetoric of “defending Christian values” currently being advanced in Armenia.

The issue here is not so much Garegin II himself as the political subtext of the developments outlined above: why is there an attempt, at this particular moment, to turn the question of why the Catholicos was not invited to the National Assembly’s inaugural session into a political confrontation?

This question is particularly important because the demand is coming from political forces that have already, in recent years, attempted to turn the Church and its senior representatives into a resource for political mobilization.

After losing the elections, Samvel Karapetyan, the de facto leader of the “Strong Armenia” alliance, declared that there would be a street struggle, but that it would require an appropriate political “trigger.” Against that backdrop, the uproar over the Catholicos’s absence on the very first day of parliamentary proceedings takes on an entirely different significance. The question is no longer simply why the Catholicos was not invited. The question is whether, by once again bringing the Catholicos and the Church into the arena of political confrontation, the newly formed opposition is attempting to create precisely the “trigger” it had previously announced. All the more so because a similar scenario has already been tried in Armenia.

The previous so-called political “trigger” was the border delimitation process in Tavush. Shortly before it began, Robert Kocharyan, leader of the “Hayastan” alliance, publicly spoke of the need for the opposition movement to be led by someone who enjoyed public respect, expressing a preference for that person to be a member of the clergy. Once the delimitation process began in Tavush, the two elements effectively came together. There was a “trigger,” and a clerical leader was found to lead the movement. The result was the so-called “Sacred Struggle” led by Bagrat Galstanyan.

The political calculation behind the movement was fairly straightforward: to turn a clergyman’s spiritual status and authority into political capital, allowing a portion of the public’s trust in the Church to be transferred to the political movement and, in turn, transforming the discontent generated by the delimitation process into an opportunity for regime change. The attempt, however, failed. This was despite the movement having the support of Garegin II and despite the full range of available tools of ecclesiastical influence being brought into play. Ultimately, the calculation that spiritual authority could be converted into political legitimacy proved unsuccessful, and the movement failed to generate broad public mobilization.

This time, however, the opposition faces a more difficult challenge. There is no Tavush, or any other immediate issue, that needs to be “saved.” Instead, there is the expectation of a previously announced “trigger,” and an attempt to politicize the Catholicos’s absence on the very first day of parliamentary proceedings. It is at this point that the question of why the Catholicos was absent from the Assembly’s session ceases to be a mere dispute over protocol and becomes part of a broader political process—one in which the Church is once again being used as an instrument of domestic political struggle, even though previous attempts have failed.

Whether this is simply a lack of political imagination or another application of the same tired Russian playbook, I leave that to the reader to decide. But if the calculation really is that an artificially manufactured confrontation around Garegin II can provide fuel for a new street movement, the “Strong Armenia” alliance would do well to study the not-so-distant experience of its current parliamentary partners, the “Hayastan” alliance. That experience has already demonstrated something very clearly: once a political technology has failed, simply changing the names of the actors is not enough to make it work a second time.

Author: Elen Hokhikyan

This version of the article was translated from the original Armenian with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and has been reviewed for accuracy.