Reforms First, Candidacy Later
Armenia’s elections in June could be a critical inflection point, not only for its domestic politics but also for its relationship with the EU.
Over the past four years, under the Civil Contract government led by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia has diversified its foreign policy. Engagement with the EU has been an increasingly central component and has included the launch of a visa-liberalization dialogue in 2025 and EU support through the European Peace Facility in 2024 and 2025. But Yerevan has not applied for membership, preferring first to advance its alignment with EU political and institutional frameworks. The parliamentary elections in June will test whether this approach can withstand the pressures of an increasingly polarized domestic political environment and whether the resulting government will sustain the current reform trajectory.
For the EU, Armenia is a key test case of its ability to sustain its external influence, support democratic governance, and act as a credible strategic actor. In the context of intensifying geopolitical competition and shifting regional alignments, the trajectory of the country’s reforms will shape not only its domestic resilience but also the EU’s credibility in its eastern neighborhood.
Armenia–EU Relations
A decisive turning point in Armenia’s foreign policy came in 2022–2023, with the culmination of the conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh and its consequences for territorial sovereignty and population displacement, and Russia’s failure to uphold its security commitments to the country. While Yerevan had long left room for engagement with the West alongside its relations with Moscow, these developments drove it to turn diversification from rhetoric into strategy. Since then, relations with the EU have progressed along several tracks, culminating in the first EU–Armenia summit, which will be held in Yerevan in May.
Their deepening engagement has been marked by a more structured agenda toward strategic alignment, and accompanied by a growing EU presence on the ground, most visibly through the deployment of a civilian monitoring mission along the border with Azerbaijan. The EU has also increased its financial support, including a recent €140 million package to support reforms linked to visa liberalization. The EU–Armenia Resilience and Growth Plan for 2024–2027, a €270 million initiative combining grants and investments, seeks to strengthen socio-economic development, to support infrastructure and small and medium-sized enterprises, and to advance digital transformation. Through the European Peace Facility, the EU has also provided approximately €30 million in nonlethal defense equipment in 2024 and 2026—a cautious expansion of its role in the country’s security. The EU is also one of the principal donors supporting Armenia’s reform process.
This engagement has generated domestic contestation, however. Segments of the opposition question the pace and direction of Armenia’s foreign policy change and advocate alternative orientations. In parallel, the government’s diplomatic efforts for stability in the region, particularly through peace negotiations with Azerbaijan, renewed contacts with Türkiye, and the maintenance of stable relations with Iran (a key neighbor for connectivity and strategic balance), have added complexity to the country’s foreign policy. The war situation in Iran could now put humanitarian pressure on Armenia—including possible population movements that would strain its border management, reception capacity, and local services—and disrupt trade and transit routes important to its economic resilience.
This increases the need for the EU to calibrate its engagement with Armenia in line with the latter’s regional vulnerabilities. A Strategic Agenda for the EU–Armenia Partnership was adopted in December, further structuring political, economic, and institutional cooperation. This builds on the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement of 2017 and brings Armenia’s reform commitments increasingly in line with those expected of candidate countries. This can be seen as a step toward a more coherent and strategically grounded EU approach to Armenia.
Armenia has also in recent years increasingly engaged with the United States, based on a perception of the EU’s limited effectiveness in the region. The EU’s efforts at mediation between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2022–2023 did not produce durable outcomes. More broadly, the EU is often perceived in Yerevan as slow, constrained by divisions among member states, and hesitant in deploying its instruments. By contrast, the United States has been seen as more directly engaged in the South Caucasus in recent years, and particularly since the start of the second Trump administration. At the same time, recent exchanges between Armenia and Russia have showed the increasingly complex and at times ambivalent nature of their relations. While the official rhetoric is one of cooperation, statements by both sides reflect underlying divergences. Notably, Russian officials have emphasized the incompatibility of Armenia’s deeper engagement with EU economic frameworks with its membership in the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). In the meeting on April 1 between Pashinyan and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, the latter said that “being in a customs union with the European Union and being in the EAEU is impossible”. The leadership in Yerevan continues to frame their current approach as an attempt to combine the two for as long as possible.
The logic underpinning Armenia’s approach to the EU is pragmatic. Rather than capitalizing on the enlargement momentum generated by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine by applying for membership, it is pursuing a “reforms first, candidacy later” strategy. This means aligning with EU standards and implementing reforms expected of candidates in advance of an application. The objective is to ensure that, when a favorable political window emerges in the EU or in the geopolitical environment, Armenia could apply, be granted candidate status, and not have to start the accession process from scratch. This approach also helps the government to manage domestic expectations while preserving flexibility. It treats EU membership less as an immediate policy objective and more as a strategic horizon—present in domestic political discourse, but to be formalized only when it becomes realistically achievable within a not-too-long timeframe.
This means that Armenia is undertaking substantial alignment without the EU having to make immediate commitments. But, in the absence of a formal accession process, reform momentum is more vulnerable to domestic dynamics, particularly in the context of increasingly polarized politics.
The Geopoliticization of Elections
The campaigning for Armenia’s parliamentary elections is unfolding amid heightened polarization. Politics has become dominated by narratives in which geopolitical alignment overshadows socio-economic and governance questions such as energy prices, employment and social welfare—a pattern seen across the post-Soviet space. As a result, electoral competition tends to shift away from domestic policy contestation. Even local elections have, at times, been affected.
This has important implications for Armenia’s potential EU prospects. If the elections turn into a de facto referendum on geopolitical alignment, the reform agenda risks becoming subordinated, with the competing parties evaluated primarily on their geopolitical stance rather than their governance performance and proposals. Governance reforms lose political traction and public support when filtered through a binary “pro-West versus pro-Russia” lens. At the same time, heightened polarization creates openings for domestic and external actors who benefit from discrediting Armenia’s EU aspirations. Narratives suggesting that engagement with the EU is open-ended and unrewarding, often encapsulated in the claim that “It is never enough for the Europeans”, may gain greater resonance in a situation where reform fatigue could emerge, particularly if tangible outcomes remain limited.
In this context, the outcome of the elections is likely to matter less in terms of specific government policies than in terms of the quality of governance. There is support for EU engagement across much of the political spectrum, including segments of the divided opposition. Smaller forces advocating closer alignment with Russia retain the ability to shape the political discourse, though, and reinforce the geopolitical framing. The key factor will be whether the government resulting from the elections reinforces or mitigates the dynamics of polarization. A situation in which geopolitical competition is used as an excuse for authoritarian measures (even under a pro-EU banner) would undermine the democratic substance of engagement with the EU. The recent criticism of Pashinyan and the government related to the treatment of opposition actors and the narrowing of political space shows that the risk is not hypothetical. Even if the concerns are contested, there is a need for the EU to scrutinize the country’s democratic standards. Conversely, efforts to weaken the geopolitical framing and to refocus political competition on governance outcomes could significantly strengthen the reform momentum.
There are clear strategic implications for the EU. Although it has increased its engagement through financial assistance, political dialogue, and high-level initiatives such as the summit, its ability to sustain and visibly reinforce this role up to the elections and beyond will be decisive. Failure to do so risks diminishing the EU’s influence in the country as well as weakening its position in the South Caucasus amid intensifying geopolitical competition.
Regional Lessons: Between Geopolitics and Reform?
The situation in Armenia increasingly reflects dynamics observed in other Eastern Partnership countries, in paerticular Georgia and Moldova, where—respectively—the 2024 parliamentary elections and the 2024 simultaneous presidential election and referendum had EU integration as the central axis of political competition. This crowded out other policy and governance debates. And, in both cases, this increased polarization and had significant consequences—such as greater pressure on judicial independence, constraints on media pluralism, and the politicization of state institutions—as well as for the EU’s credibility as a transformative actor. A comparable dynamic has begun to unfold in Armenia and could worsen after the elections, with implications for its reform trajectory and the EU’s role in the region.
Both sides take a regional perspective in their engagement. The EU continues to approach Armenia largely within the framework of the Eastern Partnership, and Armenia increasingly emphasizes regional linkage. Yerevan operates within a regional environment shaped by Georgia’s position as main transit state in the South Caucasus and Moldova’s experience in producing an electoral mandate for a pro-EU orientation. Addressing the European Parliament in March, Pashinyan framed Armenia–EU relations in connection with developments in Georgia, saying that the country “is our path to the European Union” and that the state of EU–Georgia relations directly affect Armenia.
The tendency for politics to become defined by the question of geopolitical alignment with the EU or Russia is perhaps the most concerning regional lesson. Armenia has started on a similar trajectory as that of Georgia and Moldova, and the elections are likely to intensify this. Recent statements from Moscow, including Putin emphasizing the ability of pro-Russia political actors to participate in the elections, show a continued interest in how Armenia’s political landscape evolves. The lesson for all stakeholders in Armenia and the EU is that geopoliticization has been extremely difficult to reverse elsewhere, and that the resulting polarization corrodes the democratic institutions that engagement with the EU is meant to strengthen.
Armenia’s decision not to apply for EU membership for now is also intended to avoid the accession fatigue that has afflicted Georgia and Moldova. The societal exhaustion that develops when membership is perceived as distant and the accession process as open-ended can be exploited by political actors. Disillusionment with the EU’s slow pace contributed to the erosion of the pro-membership consensus in Georgia. Moldova, too, has experienced periods in which the gap between expectations and outcomes fueled such skepticism. By framing EU-compatible reforms as intrinsically valuable rather than as steps toward a distant possible membership, Armenia’s government has so far tempered the expectations risk. Whether this framing can be sustained under the pressures of a highly polarized electoral campaign remains to be seen.
For the EU, three lessons from the experiences of Georgia and Moldova are relevant in the context of Armenia’s elections. First, when EU integration becomes the dominant axis of political competition, there is a risk that democratic standards are subordinated to geopolitical alignment, with local actors assessing reforms through this lens rather than the institutional one. Second, slow or ambiguous signals from the EU can contribute to public disillusionment, allowing skeptical narratives to gain traction. Third, inconsistent conditionality can undermine the EU’s credibility, particularly when governments it perceives as pro-EU are not held to the same democratic standards as others.
These lessons suggest that the EU needs to balance its political engagement with Armenia with clear and consistent expectations, avoiding over-politicization and strategic ambiguity. Yerevan’s current approach of building the institutional and legislative infrastructure of a candidate country without the formal label partly mirrors Moldova’s reform push before it received candidate status in 2022. As noted, the advantage in this is that Armenia would not face the challenge of starting an eventual accession process from scratch. However, there is also a risk that reform momentum is more vulnerable to the shifting dynamics of electoral politics without the anchoring effect of candidate status.
Recommendations for the EU
Armenia’s elections present a test of the EU’s ability to apply the above lessons. It needs to calibrate its engagement with the country in a way that sustains reform momentum there without reinforcing the geopoliticization that has undermined its influence in Georgia and Moldova. The following steps would help the EU institutions and member states to do so.
Apply negative and positive conditionality more consistently
The EU uses conditionality unevenly in its eastern neighborhood. At times, it prioritizes strategic interests over democratic standards and human rights—for example in the case of Azerbaijan and energy cooperation—reinforcing the perception that it tolerates democratic backsliding when the geopolitical stakes are high. The record in countries like Azerbaijan shows that the EU needs to make better use of its “sticks” before authoritarian trends become irreversible.
In the case of Armenia, the European Commission and the European External Action Service (EEAS), in coordination with the member states, should deploy appropriate corrective measures before the emerging negative trends observed become entrenched. Equally, they must deliver promptly and visibly tangible rewards for genuine reform progress. Greater consistency across policy strands, and between the EU's democratic rhetoric and its economic support, would strengthen reform incentives for Armenia.
Consistent application of EU conditionality empowers democratic actors and provides a credible external anchor for reform. It does not limit the EU’s room for maneuvering but reinforces its leverage and credibility in the region.
Prevent the political instrumentalization of countering foreign interference
Across the region, governments have invoked foreign interference and hybrid threats to justify restrictions on media freedom and to constrain critical voices, and Armenia has not been immune to this. Such practices do not only erode democratic standards; when governments frame this as part of alignment with the EU, this undermines the EU’s normative agenda.
The EEAS, the EU delegation in Yerevan, and the member states in their bilateral engagement, should ensure that legitimate measures to counter malicious foreign influence, such as mandating transparency of foreign funding, media regulation, and enforcement of existing legal frameworks, are not used to justify political suppression. Ensuring that security policy does not lead to restrictions on pluralism is essential not only for Armenia’s democratic resilience, but also for preserving the EU’s credibility as a normative actor.
Calibrate engagement to Armenia’s threat environment
Armenia is in a complex security environment shaped by simultaneous pressures from Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia, and Türkiye, as well as from the regional impacts of the Iran war, and its foreign policy choices are conditioned by overlapping vulnerabilities. The EU’s engagement must clearly avoid appearing as if it is placing Yerevan before a zero-sum geopolitical choice, which would lead the population to think their country is being pressured to undermine its stability and security.
Failing to take this environment into account can lead the EU not only to weaken reform prospects in Armenia but also to reduce its own strategic relevance in this neighborhood. The EU institutions and member states should therefore calibrate their engagement to match the country’s threat environment, and accordingly adapt their support instruments, sequencing of conditionality benchmarks, and diplomatic posture. Offering flexibility and sequencing will be critical for sustaining reform momentum while maintaining the EU’s influence.
The views expressed herein are those solely of the author(s). GMF as an institution does not take positions.