Protesters demanding Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s resignation marched through the center of Yerevan on Friday on the second day of demonstrations led by Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan and backed by virtually all Armenian opposition groups.
The protesters headed to Armenia’s main state-run universities in the morning, with Galstanyan renewing his calls for their students and faculties to boycott classes and join his campaign triggered by Pashinyan’s decision to hand over several disputed border areas to Azerbaijan. He repeatedly appealed to them through a megaphone as the crowd reached the university buildings in the Armenian capital.
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Although there were no indications of a widespread boycott of classes, some students appeared to join the march. A group of them staged a separate protest at the Yerevan State University campus.
“We must continue our civil disobedience actions,” Galstanyan told reporters. “We cannot retreat and back down in any way.”
The outspoken archbishop supported by the Armenian Apostolic Church urged citizens to again gather in Yerevan’s central Republic Square in the evening.
Tens of thousands of Armenians rallied there on Sunday after Galstanyan and antigovernment activists accompanying him reached Yerevan following a five-day march that began in Kirants, one of the border villages in the northern Tavush province adjacent to the border areas which Pashinyan’s government wants to cede to Azerbaijan.
Addressing the massive crowd, Galstanyan for the first time demanded Pashinyan’s resignation. The two opposition groups represented in the Armenian parliament were quick to assure him to that they will try to initiate a parliamentary vote of no confidence in the prime minister.
The parliament is controlled by Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party. Senior lawmakers representing it insisted on Friday that neither they nor any of their pro-government colleagues will back the motion of censure planned by the opposition.
One of those lawmakers, Gagik Melkonian, suggested that Pashinyan could bow to the pressure only if at least 400,000 people take to the streets to demand his resignation. Another, Hovik Aghazarian, accused the opposition of paying people to attend the ongoing protests. Aghazarian declined to publicize evidence of his allegations which he said he has submitted to law-enforcement authorities.
Galstanyan, who heads the church’s Tavush Diocese, has faced scathing attacks from Pashinyan’s political allies ever since the outbreak of the protests against the territorial concessions to Baku on April 20. During an April 30 session of the National Assembly, Civil Contract deputies branded him a Russian spy, accused him of provoking another war with Azerbaijan and even called on Armenian border guards to forcibly draft the 52-year-old archbishop.