Minasian stepped down on October 1 a week after more than a dozen parliament deputies from Civil Contract signed a petition calling on Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian to sack him. The deputies said that unlike Minasian, the new minister must be affiliated with the ruling party.
The party’s governing board has since considered eight candidacies for the vacant post. None of them has been backed by a majority of the board members.
The most recent board meeting chaired by Pashinian took place late on Tuesday. The ministerial candidates rejected during the meeting included senior Civil Contract parliamentarian Armen Khachatrian, Yerevan’s Deputy Mayor Suren Grigorian and lawyer Aleksandr Sirunian.
One of the board members, parliament speaker Alen Simonian, said on Wednesday that Pashinian’s party should now consider designating other candidates who are not Civil Contract members. Such individuals have already been proposed, he said without naming anyone.
Sources told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that they include Deputy Interior Minister Arpine Sargsian and Liana Ghaltakhchian, who currently runs a children’s charity. The Civil Contract board is expected to discuss their nomination next week. Pashinian has still not commented on his likely choice of the next minister.
Minasian, the former minister, is as a close friend of Karen Andreasian, a Pashinian ally heading the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) overseeing Armenian courts. The two men have significantly increased the number of disciplinary proceedings against Armenian judges over the past two. Some of those judges have been removed from the bench in what opposition leaders and some legal experts see as a government effort to curb judicial independence in the country.