Parliament speaker Alen Simonyan on Tuesday accused the Armenian Apostolic Church of meddling in politics and said the government should impose more taxes on it in response to antigovernment protests led by one of its archbishops.
Simonian, who is a key member of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s entourage, attacked the church on the parliament floor and in separate comments to the press made afterwards.
“The church should not be involved in politics … Politics is trade. You trade when you form a coalition or draw up an [electoral] list, and the church is engaged in trade instead of doing its job,” he said.
Simonian also alleged that the church is “not paying taxes.” The Armenian authorities, he said, should make sure that it has the same “tax obligations” as businesses.
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Both the Echmiadzin-based Mother See of the church and Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, the primate of its Tavush Diocese seeking to oust Pashinyan, accused Simonian of lying. Galstanyan argued that the church not only pays taxes but has never requested or received any government compensation for the Soviet-era loss of most of its worship sites and other property.
The ancient church, to which the vast majority of Armenians nominally belong, is 488th on the latest list of the country’s 1,000 largest taxpayers released by the State Revenue Committee last month. It is only exempt from property taxes because of its non-profit character and what the Armenian constitution describes as its “exceptional role” in the country’s history and social life.
The church’s Supreme Spiritual Council officially voiced support for Galstanyan and his supporters on May 7 as they marched from the Tavush province to Yerevan to protest against Pashinyan’s territorial concessions to Azerbaijan. The outspoken archbishop also demanded Pashinyan’s resignation when he rallied tens of thousands of people in the capital two days later. His continuing campaign for regime change has been joined or endorsed by virtually all Armenian opposition groups.
Galstanyan acknowledged on Tuesday that he regularly discusses the protest movement with Catholicos Garegin II, the supreme head of the church who has been increasingly at odds with Pashinyan in recent years. But he would not be drawn on Garegin’s precise role in the movement.
“I meet His Holiness every other day,” Galstanyan told reporters. “I inform him, talk to him about details. We have discussions involving not only His Holiness but also other clergymen. This is natural.”
Garegin and other senior clergymen had already joined the Armenian opposition in calling for Pashinyan’s resignation following Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 war with Azerbaijan. Tensions between the government and the church rose further last October when Garegin blamed Pashinyan for Azerbaijan’s recapture of Nagorno-Karabakh and the resulting mass exodus of the region’s ethnic Armenian population.