In what they called a change of tactics, they said they will dismantle tents pitched in the center of Yerevan, switch to weekly rallies and try to attract a larger following.
Ishkhan Saghatelian, one of the opposition leaders, admitted that many Armenians unhappy with Pashinian’s government have avoided participating in the protests.
“We have not yet managed to get all those people to the streets and to bring them to this square. There are still people who think this is s fight for power, for the return of former rulers to power,” Saghatelian told thousands of supporters rallying in Yerevan’s France Square, the site of the opposition tent camp.
The two opposition alliances represented in the Armenian parliament launched their campaign there on May 1 two weeks after Pashinian signaled his readiness to recognize Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and “lower the bar” on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh acceptable to the Armenian side. They accused Pashinian of helping Baku regain full control of Karabakh.
Opposition supporters have since regularly marched through the city center, closed roads and blocked the entrances to government buildings, repeatedly clashing with riot police. The most serious of those clashes, which broke out on June 3, left dozens of protesters and police officers seriously injured.
Pashinian and his political allies have dismissed the opposition demands for his resignation. They say that the opposition has failed to attract popular support for regime change.
Saghatelian, who has been the main speaker at the protests, put a brave face on the failure to unseat the prime minister. He claimed that the opposition has managed to “awaken the society” and scuttle a “new capitulation agreement” with Azerbaijan. The protests have showed that Pashinian lacks a popular “mandate to lead Armenia to vital concessions” to Baku, he said.
“We will definitely oust Nikol but we will do that bloodlessly,” Saghatelian told the crowd.
The opposition forces, he went on, have to “change the structure and tactic of our resistance movement in a way that will allow us to give it new impetus.” They will now hold major rallies on a weekly basis and set up, in the meantime, new structures in and outside Yerevan, he said.
Saghatelian said they will also keep fighting for the release of over three dozen opposition activists and supporters arrested during the protest movement.
The vast majority of them were charged with assaulting police officers or government loyalists. Opposition leaders reject the accusations as politically motivated.