By Andranik Aboyan
There is far too much talk in Armenian political life about unity, and far too little talk about substance. Unity has become a fetish word, invoked whenever thought runs thin, whenever a failed political class wishes to cover over programmatic emptiness with patriotic sentiment. We are told that this is a moment above faction, above ideology, above historical grievances, above old divisions. We are told that national survival requires everyone to stand together against the ruling regime. It sounds noble. It sounds urgent. It sounds self-evident. It is also, in its current form, profoundly misleading.
Unity around what? Toward what end? In service of which class, which state, which historical project?
These are the questions that always go unanswered. The appeal to unity is presented as though it were self-legitimating, as though the assembling of all anti-regime tendencies into one broad front were itself a strategy. But political life does not work that way. A coalition is not a program. A mood is not a movement. And the mere accumulation of mutually suspicious forces under a single banner does not produce national recovery. More often, it produces paralysis, dilution, and one more round of disappointment.
The Armenian electorate understands this better than many commentators do. That is why so much of it remains undecided. The undecided voter in Armenia is not simply ignorant, passive, or waiting to be morally scolded into responsibility. He is unconvinced. He has seen too much. He has watched parties and alliances arise under the sign of emergency, patriotism, reform, salvation, and necessity, only to dissolve into the same familiar sequence of compromise, exhaustion, and betrayal. He has learned, correctly, that much of what passes for politics in post-independence Armenia is theater performed atop structures he does not control.
This is the deeper crisis of bourgeois democracy in Armenia. Since independence, it has done the Armenian Revolutionary Federation no favors, and it has done the Armenian people even fewer. It has rewarded money, spectacle, clientelism, foreign patronage, and ideological softness. It has penalized discipline, memory, doctrine, and rootedness. It has elevated the tactician over the statesman, the manager over the organizer, the pliable over the principled. Every few years, the people are asked to believe that this time the electoral mechanism will somehow generate dignity, sovereignty, and justice, despite the fact that the structure itself has repeatedly produced their opposite.
The ARF has borne the marks of this system perhaps more clearly than most. Again and again, Dashnaktsutyun has been asked to moderate itself, trim its edges, mute its historical voice, and enter formations built less on conviction than on temporary arithmetic. Again and again, it has been told that broader unity requires ideological restraint, that the movement must think less of itself and more of the national whole, as though the two were opposed. Yet the practical result of these arrangements has almost always been the same: the ARF contributes seriousness, organization, sacrifice, and legitimacy, while others retain the freedom to posture, maneuver, and defect. The burden of unity falls unequally. The disciplined are told to dissolve themselves. The opportunists are allowed to remain exactly what they are.
At some point, one must say it plainly: this rhetoric of unity functions as a trap.
It benefits those who have no real doctrine of their own. It benefits those whose politics are exhausted, whose only offer is a vague anti-government sentiment without social depth or national strategy. It benefits those who wish to borrow the moral capital of historic movements while binding them to programs they did not shape. And above all, it benefits the ruling order itself, because an opposition that refuses to clarify its internal contradictions in the name of surface harmony is an opposition that arrives at the decisive moment already weakened.
Armenia does not suffer from too little unity. It suffers from too little clarity.
It suffers from a political culture unable or unwilling to name the structure of the crisis. The nation has been taught to speak endlessly of personalities, scandals, missteps, and tactical failures while avoiding the more dangerous truth: the post-independence order has failed not merely because the wrong people occupied office, but because the social and political foundations of the republic were made thin, dependent, and vulnerable. Oligarchic accumulation, economic dependency, emigration, military neglect, cultural demoralization, and the conversion of sovereignty into a negotiable asset did not emerge accidentally. They emerged from a regime in which the forms of democracy concealed the substance of elite rule.
That is why the disillusionment of the Armenian electorate is so profound. People do not merely hate this government or that figure. They are sick of a whole atmosphere of managed diminishment. They are sick of being told to adapt themselves to loss. Sick of hearing that retreat is realism, that dependency is pragmatism, that humiliation is diplomacy, that national discipline is extremism, and that social concern must always defer to market logic, foreign pressure, or elite convenience. They feel, even if they do not always articulate it in ideological language, that something fundamental has been stolen from public life.
And here is the crucial point that the apostles of unity fail to understand: these people are already closer to the ARF than many of them know.
Not because they all consciously identify as Dashnaks. Not because they have mastered the movement’s history or formally embraced its doctrine. But because their anger, when taken seriously, points in the same direction. Their resentment is not random. It springs from humiliation, dispossession, insecurity, inequality, and the sense that Armenian life has been made cheap in its own homeland. Their instincts are social as much as they are national. They do not want merely a different set of administrators. They want a state that respects itself, an economy that serves the people rather than cannibalizing them, a political life animated by continuity and duty rather than branding and improvisation.
Oppression has a way of clarifying what comfort obscures. Under pressure, hidden alignments become visible. People who believed themselves separate begin to recognize that they have been injured by the same order, diminished by the same logic, ruled through the same degradation. That is precisely the condition Armenia approaches. Every citizen who curses the ruling regime, every citizen who recoils from the reduction of sovereignty to transaction, every citizen who senses that the existing political vocabulary is too shallow to describe the damage being done, already carries within him the germ of an ARF impulse. He may not call it that. He may not even know its source. But he is already leaning toward a politics of dignity, continuity, social obligation, national production, and collective defense. He is already far closer to us than to the liberal technocrats, donor-shaped moderates, or comprador opportunists who speak the language of reform while managing decline.
This is why the answer is not broader unity. The answer is recovery of political form.
The ARF should not dissolve itself into another exhausted anti-regime assemblage. It should not subordinate its identity to a temporary coalition whose main achievement would be to blur the very distinctions that matter. It should not chase relevance by surrendering the sources of its relevance. It should return to its roots.
That does not mean nostalgia. It does not mean costume politics or ritual invocations of a heroic past. It means something harder: becoming once again a disciplined ideological force capable of interpreting the crisis as a whole. A movement that understands that the national and the social cannot be separated. A movement that sees sovereignty not as a slogan but as a material condition requiring military seriousness, productive capacity, social cohesion, and moral confidence. A movement that knows the village, the worker, the soldier, the teacher, the emigre, and the youth are not disconnected constituencies but parts of one national organism.
The ARF at its best never understood the Armenian question as a matter of flag-waving abstraction. It understood that a people survives historically only when it is organized, when it can defend itself, when labor and sacrifice are given public meaning, when national belonging is thickened by institutions and discipline, when dignity is built into the structure of everyday life. That is the tradition worth recovering now. Not parliamentary routine for its own sake, but movement politics in the fullest sense: education, organization, mobilization, ideological seriousness, and the restoration of public confidence through visible commitment.
What would this mean concretely? It would mean speaking openly again about class, not as imported jargon, but as lived Armenian reality: who bears the costs of national failure, who profits from dependency, who is sacrificed to emigration, who is asked to bleed while others speculate. It would mean speaking of oligarchy not as corruption alone but as a social order hostile to national resilience. It would mean speaking of socialism in Armenian rather than cosmopolitan terms: not as fashionable doctrine, but as the conviction that the nation cannot be defended if its people are atomized, impoverished, and stripped of stake in the republic. It would mean insisting on national production, social discipline, military reconstruction, and diaspora integration not as separate policy items but as elements of one civilizational effort.
Most of all, it would mean abandoning the defensive posture into which opposition politics so often falls. The ARF should not beg the undecided to trust yet another coalition. It should teach them to see their own condition politically. It should tell the truth: that Armenia’s crisis is not merely governmental but structural; that bourgeois democratic ritual has repeatedly failed to protect the people from dispossession; that the language of unity is frequently used to suppress the very clarity from which recovery might begin; that the nation does not need a coalition of exhaustion but a movement of recovery.
The undecided majority is not waiting for flatter slogans. It is waiting for seriousness. It is waiting for a force that believes in more than office, more than media cycles, more than tactical anti-Pashinyanism. It is waiting for a force that can say, without embarrassment or hedging, that Armenia deserves sovereignty with substance, social life with dignity, and political organization worthy of historical time.
That force should be the ARF. But it will only become that force fully if it stops treating itself as one participant among many in a perpetually deferred unity project and begins acting again like what it is: a historic movement with a doctrine, a memory, and a people to organize.
So no, unity is not sacred. Unity is not strategy. Unity is not redemption. Under present conditions, unity is often the name given to ideological surrender.
Let others praise togetherness in the abstract. Let others preach the suspension of difference while the nation continues to erode. The task before us is different. It is to gather the disillusioned, clarify the hidden alignment already forming beneath the surface, and give it structure, language, and direction. It is to recognize that those who curse the regime already sense, however dimly, that the existing order has exhausted itself. It is to show them that their anger belongs not to chaos, but to a tradition. Not to passing outrage, but to a movement.
Perhaps the time has come for the ARF to remember that.
Not as relic. Not as partner of convenience. Not as ornament of opposition respectability.
As force.
