After the election, Armenia has entered a new political phase — and it is harsher than many expected. The so-called opposition says it will take its parliamentary mandates. Samvel Karapetyan remains under house arrest. Gagik Tsarukyan has been detained, large-scale searches were conducted across locations linked to his business empire, and a court placed him in pre-trial detention for two months on charges related to large-scale fraud and money laundering. According to Reuters, the case involves alleged fraudulent imports from Iran worth about $21 million; opposition groups denounce the arrest as politically motivated.
Against this background, the public’s real question is not legal but political: why are some figures targeted immediately, while others remain untouched for years? Why Tsarukyan now? Why is Samvel Karapetyan under house arrest, while Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan are not in the same position? Does Nikol Pashinyan have “favorites”? Or is the government simply choosing the targets it can hit most easily?
The uncomfortable answer is this: when the state acts selectively, even legitimate cases begin to look like repression. Not because every accused person is innocent, but because society does not see one standard of justice.
Gagik Tsarukyan is not a random figure. He belongs to the post-Soviet economic world where politics, business, money, influence and personal connections have been intertwined for decades. But that is precisely why his case cannot look like a single isolated act. If the state truly wants to return stolen wealth to the people, it must not act according to who is politically inconvenient today. It must act according to one principle: whoever enriched himself illegally must answer.
And here we reach the most painful point: Pashinyan truly has a chance. After his party’s election victory, he has a mandate, political resources and an open window. But that chance is not about arresting one or two loud names and giving society a picture of strength. The real chance is to conduct, for the first time in thirty years, a genuine cleansing of the system — legal, evidence-based, transparent and equal for all.
If assets were stolen, they must be returned through courts.
If illegal schemes existed, they must be documented.
If there were fake privatizations, monopolies, tax evasion, political protection networks — all of it must become the subject of institutional investigation.
But if the government does this selectively, it destroys trust in the process.
The question “why not arrest Kocharyan and Sargsyan?” cannot be answered with slogans. Robert Kocharyan has already faced major criminal proceedings: the case connected to the March 1 events was terminated after Armenia’s Constitutional Court found the relevant article unconstitutional, and separate corruption-related proceedings also had a complicated legal history.Serzh Sargsyan has also faced cases: he was acquitted in the “diesel case” in 2024, but that acquittal was later overturned by the appeals court and sent back for retrial; he has also faced new charges, including bribery and illegal entrepreneurship.
So formally, one cannot say they were never touched. They were. But public perception is different: those cases did not reach a politically understandable conclusion. And for a people who have heard for thirty years about corruption, plunder, monopolies and illegal enrichment, unfinished justice looks like a deal.
This is Pashinyan’s problem. For years, he promised justice. But too often justice appeared as a political wave: today a loud case, tomorrow silence, the next day a new enemy. Trust cannot be restored that way. Trust is restored not through arrests as theatre, but through a system in which no one can hide behind a surname, a former office, money, party loyalty or private agreements.
If Pashinyan wants to remain in power not only formally but historically, he must do what the street expected from him in 2018: prove that the law is stronger than everyone. But that does not mean “arrest everyone.” It means investigate everyone without exception — Tsarukyan, Karapetyan, Kocharyan, Sargsyan, former ministers, current officials, relatives of those in power, businessmen connected to state contracts, and anyone who has lived for years near the state budget and public resources.
Because if only those who are inconvenient today are punished, that is not justice. It is fear. And fear does not build a state.
At the same time, the pseudo-opposition has no moral right to present itself purely as a victim if it spent years as part of the very system that society associates with poverty and injustice. Taking mandates, receiving salaries, shouting about repression and failing to offer a real plan for institutional cleansing — that is not political struggle. It is political business.
Armenia is now in a strange and dangerous situation: the government speaks of justice, but society fears selectivity; the opposition speaks of repression, but society does not trust its purity. Between them stands the ordinary citizen, who wants not revenge, but an answer to a simple question: who will return to the country what was taken from it for decades?
This is where Pashinyan has his last chance to restore some public faith. Not through shouting. Not through promises to imprison everyone. Not through political theatre. But through a transparent mechanism: audits of major assets, investigations into the origins of wealth, independent courts, confiscation of illegal property, protection of honest business and one law for old and new elites alike.
If he does this, he will be remembered not only as a politician who held power, but as the man who finally made the system pay its debts.
If he does not, today’s arrests will be remembered not as cleansing — but as another stage in Armenia’s political war.
By Lida Nalbandyan, Founder and CEO of Octopus Media Group