Executive Summary:
- Armenia’s parliament approved Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s 2026–2031 government program on August 25, formally binding Yerevan for a full governmental term to the institutionalization of peace with Azerbaijan through a signed treaty and continued border delimitation.
- The program largely codifies the framework established by Baku and Yerevan following the August 2025 Washington declaration, moving key elements of the peace process from negotiation into Armenian state policy.
- By linking normalization with Azerbaijan to diplomatic relations with Türkiye, the reopening of the Turkish–Armenian border, and new regional transport and energy connections, the program places Armenia within the broader connectivity agenda championed by Baku and Ankara, including through the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP).
On August 25, Armenia’s National Assembly voted 63–24 to approve Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government program for 2026–2031. This is the first full policy document produced since the Civil Contract’s re-election on June 7 (Armenpress, August 25). For Baku, the document’s significance lies less in its domestic Armenian framing than in what it commits Yerevan to over the next five years. Yerevan has now enshrined the institutionalization of peace with Azerbaijan as state policy, rather than something that could lapse with changing political circumstances.
Armenia’s government describes its approach as a “balanced and balancing” foreign policy, designed to prevent imbalances in Armenia’s external relations and provide the tools to correct them when they emerge. The program pairs this approach with an explicit “regionalization” objective, which seeks to enable Armenia to operate comfortably in its own neighborhood without relying on outside protection (Armenpress, August 20). It names Georgia, Iran, Türkiye, and Azerbaijan together as the region’s core partners before turning to relations with the European Union, the United States, and France. This approach places Baku and Ankara within Armenia’s primary foreign-policy focus, rather than treating normalization with them as a peripheral track.
The program’s Azerbaijan chapter closely tracks the framework Baku has pursued since the two countries initialed their peace treaty draft in Washington in August 2025 (President of Azerbaijan, August 9, 2025). It commits to continuing the delimitation of the shared border, signing and ratifying a full peace treaty and related legal agreements, and expanding contacts between the two countries’ business communities and civil societies (TRT World, August 20). For Azerbaijan, the value is structural rather than rhetorical. Peace has moved from a negotiating position to an explicit objective of Armenian state policy for the 2026–2031 term, regardless of cabinet reshuffles during that period (1news.az, August 20).
Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers initialed the text of the joint declaration for peace at the White House on August 8, 2025, leaving its wording settled pending signature (President of Azerbaijan, August 9, 2025). The remaining obstacle is primarily domestic rather than diplomatic. Baku has long conditioned a signature on Armenia removing the constitutional references to the 1990 Declaration of Independence and the 1989 unification act with “Nagorno-Karabakh” in the constitutional preamble, a change that requires a new constitution adopted by referendum rather than a simple parliamentary amendment. That requirement makes the government’s parliamentary strength central to the peace process. Civil Contract’s June 2026 election result gave it 64 of the National Assembly’s 105 seats, enough to govern but short of the two-thirds supermajority required to initiate a constitutional referendum, let alone guarantee its passage (see EDM, June 22). With the Kremlin-aligned opposition holding the remaining seats, the Armenian government cannot advance the constitutional process on its own. The 2026–2031 program’s pledge to sign and ratify the agreement is, in that light, a commitment to a settled text whose implementation depends on a constitutional referendum that the government does not have the votes to secure by itself.
The program pairs the Azerbaijan track with an explicit commitment to establish diplomatic relations with Türkiye, reopen the long-closed border, and bring at least two modern crossings into operation, alongside the restoration of transport, energy, and digital links (JAM-News, August 20). From Baku’s perspective, this is not a separate bilateral process but an extension of the same connectivity logic underpinning the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) transit initiative, which Azerbaijan and Türkiye have jointly promoted, including through their trilateral coordination with Georgia on the project’s implementation (APA, June 8).
The program’s energy language makes this connectivity agenda explicit, stating that normalization with Azerbaijan and Türkiye could enable the expansion of new energy corridors. Armenian officials have already raised the possibility of importing Azerbaijani gas through pipeline transit across Armenian territory as normalization with Baku and Ankara advances (CivilNet, August 21). If realized, such an arrangement would embed Azerbaijan directly into Armenia’s energy security architecture, rather than leaving Russia as its default external supplier. The energy agenda also moved beyond policy language into technical discussions on the ground. On August 25, representatives of Armenia’s Ministry of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure and its Electric Power System Operator met counterparts from Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Energy and Azerenerji in Lachin to discuss electricity imports and exports, as well as options for interconnecting the two countries’ energy infrastructure at the shared border (APA News Agency, August 25). The announcement was brief, confirming only that the meeting had taken place, but its significance lay in the participants. Unlike earlier political-level statements, this meeting brought together the technical bodies responsible for operating the two countries’ power grids, suggesting that the energy track is moving from declaratory intent toward an assessment of its commercial and technical feasibility (JAM-News, August 27).
Official Baku has signaled its own reading of the program’s central concept. In an August 5 interview with the Turkish daily Milliyet—published two weeks before the program’s own release—Assistant to the Azerbaijani President Hikmat Hajiyev welcomed the Real Armenia framework adopted by Yerevan, describing it as a sign that Armenia’s leadership has recognized the cost of its earlier confrontational policies. Hajiyev added that after Armenia’s parliamentary elections and constitutional revision were complete, no legal or political obstacle would remain to signing the treaty, and that Azerbaijan’s objective is to conclude the Armenia–Azerbaijan and Armenia–Türkiye normalization tracks “in parallel and effectively.” He also argued that opening of the Zangezur Corridor (now referred to as TRIPP) would serve Armenia’s own transit interests, rather than only those of Baku and Ankara (Milliyet, August 5).
Taken together, Armenia’s new five-year program suggests that the peace framework established with Azerbaijan in Washington is becoming embedded in the architecture of Armenian state policy. Its commitments to sign and ratify the peace treaty, continue border delimitation, normalize relations with Türkiye, reopen regional transport links, and explore energy interconnections point toward a regional order defined by connectivity rather than confrontation. The principal uncertainty is no longer whether Yerevan’s government endorses this direction, but whether it can overcome the constitutional and political obstacles between its stated objectives and their implementation. In this sense, the program does not merely reaffirm the Washington framework, it marks a step toward institutionalization within Armenia’s domestic and foreign policy.
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