Politician: Pashinyan's China visit 'bursts EU membership bubble'

Opposition politician Armen Ashotyan, deputy chairman of the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA), has criticized Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s ongoing visit to China and Armenia’s application to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), claiming the move once again deflates the government’s rhetoric about possible European Union membership.

"Nikol Pashinyan’s Chinese voyage, particularly Armenia’s bid for SCO membership, has once again burst the EU membership bubble that the regime has been inflating,” Ashotyan said in a social media post on Monday.

According to him, while there are currently no formal legal barriers preventing Armenia from seeking both EU and SCO membership simultaneously, unlike the incompatibility with the Eurasian Economic Union, the orientations toward Brussels and Beijing are fundamentally contradictory.

Ashotyan also dismissed Pashinyan’s justification for the SCO bid. On August 16, the prime minister argued that the organization planned to abolish the status of observer and associate membership. However, Ashotyan pointed out that the final declaration adopted in China merely merged the two statuses, rather than eliminating them altogether.

“This effectively devalues Pashinyan’s narrative, which was aimed at misleading Brussels bureaucrats,” Ashotyan argued.

He further noted that while the SCO declaration addressed multiple conflicts from Afghanistan to Gaza, it made no mention of the South Caucasus or the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process, which he suggested warrants separate analysis.