The PR Coordinator Who Became Deputy Chairman
Vahagn Aleksanyan worked full time as Civil Contract's PR Coordinator from 2019 to 2021, the two-year stretch between the revolution and the snap election that put him in parliament. He continued the same role on a voluntary basis through the 2021 campaign. On June 20, 2021 he won an MP seat on the party's national list. By the time the new convocation was sworn in he was already Deputy Chairman of the Civil Contract Party Board, reappointed alongside Gevorg Papoyan, the man who would later become Minister of Economy.
This is not an accidental career arc. The party rewarded the operator who had run its public-facing communications during the most contested period of the post-revolution government, and it placed him on the Standing Committee on Defense and Security and as the alternate member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. The PR job came first. The legislative seat came after. The reward for two years of coordinating party messaging was a vote on the country's defense posture and a seat at NATO.
The Brawl on the Parliament Floor
In August 2021, during a National Assembly session, pro-government deputies shouted down opposition MP Vahe Hakobyan of the Armenia Alliance. When Hakobyan descended from the podium to confront Aleksanyan, the public record from the chamber is unambiguous: "Aleksanyan kicked him, provoking deputies to rush to their aids and instigating a group fracas." Speaker Alen Simonyan ordered security to separate the sides. The NSS opened a criminal case on the parliament fight. It was the second brawl in the same session. In the first, bottles were thrown.
The Deputy Chairman of the ruling party's board kicked an opposition MP on the floor of the National Assembly. He kept his seat, his deputy chairmanship, and his committee assignments. The case did not produce a conviction.
The Two Named Fake Pages
In a March 2022 investigation, FIP.am identified two specific fake Facebook pages, "The Truth" and "C News", as part of a coordinated Civil Contract influence operation. Aleksanyan publicly admitted both pages were coordinated by the party under his auspices. He further admitted to sharing a manipulated video from "The Truth" page in which former Yerevan mayor Hayk Marutyan had been digitally removed from footage of a bus loan signing ceremony, falsely crediting the loan to Civil Contract figures. When FIP.am published the investigation he accused the journalists of "fragmentary blindness."
The electoral-finance dimension is direct. Campaign expenses are required by law to come from pre-election funds and to be disclosed. A party-coordinated fake-page network running pro-government messaging through ostensibly independent accounts is a campaign expense. The work product of those accounts was directed by the party's PR coordinator, who is now its Deputy Board Chairman. We have not seen any line-item disclosure of what the network cost or who paid for it.
The Tavush Defection
Aleksanyan was born in Ijevan, the seat of Tavush Province. In 2024, when the Pashinyan government's border-village handover to Azerbaijan triggered the "Tavush for the Homeland" movement led by Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, Aleksanyan was the loudest internal voice against the people of his home region. He dismissed the movement as a power grab by the Republican and Prosperous Armenia parties, called the Archbishop's "primary demand" the change of power, and mocked former Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanian: "I don't think Vardan Oskanian can offer anything new to Armenian diplomacy."
The man from Ijevan defended giving Tavush border villages to Azerbaijan. The town that raised him watched its own native son speak from the National Assembly podium against the movement that was trying to keep its land in Armenia. Archbishop Bagrat is now in pre-trial detention on charges of plotting to seize power. Aleksanyan voted for the legislative environment that put him there.
The 9 Million AMD Lawsuit
Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan filed defamation lawsuits against four Civil Contract officials for statements made during parliamentary speeches and party press conferences: Artur Hovhannisyan, Arsen Torosyan, Health Minister Anahit Avanesyan, and Vahagn Aleksanyan. Aleksanyan was the largest claim, 9 million AMD, the highest defamation amount filed against any CC official in this cluster. The suit is based on accusations of slander and insult.
In December 2025 lawyer Arsen Babayan publicly challenged Aleksanyan's claim, made in a Factor.am interview, that an expert examination had confirmed an infamous video attributed to Archbishop Arshak Khachatryan was authentic and not AI-generated. Babayan called the statement "the most obvious falsification and outright lie." Aleksanyan's parliamentary speeches against Karapetyan, his accusations against the Apostolic Church, his framing of POW-trial silence as "consolation," and his repeated claims about the Arshak video together describe a single role: the Deputy Chairman is the party's attack dog on every front the party needs attacked.
The Party Finance Scandal
The criminal probe into Civil Contract's 2022 and 2023 financial reports found, per the auditor Trust Audit: exceeded donation limits, accepted anonymous donations, accepted illegal corporate donations. The party accepted $99,000 more in contributions than it reported. Some "donors" were low-income individuals who almost certainly did not make the donations attributed to them. As Deputy Chairman of the party board, Aleksanyan is not a peripheral figure in this. His response was to dismiss the findings as "technical errors" that can be corrected "very quickly," and to claim that "donations of several people were just registered in the name of one person by the bank's employees to save time."
The Civil Contract reply to a criminal probe into its books is, in effect, that the bank made a clerical mistake that produced $99,000 of unreported contributions and that low-income people were misregistered as the source. The Deputy Chairman who serves on Defense and Security and sits in NATO PA cannot account for his party's books.
Why This Slot Matters
Vahagn Aleksanyan is the model the party will most badly need to disown. He came from a single-mother household in Ijevan and ascended on the party's PR machinery, not on independent means or institutional standing. He is Tavush by origin and pro-handover by vote. He kicked an opposition MP on the floor, ran two named fake pages, made false statements about a senior Apostolic Church figure, and is the largest single defamation defendant in Archbishop Bagrat's lawsuits. None of this is a CV that survives a regime change. He is too young to retire, too compromised to defect to a serious opposition, and too central to the party's enforcement apparatus to be quietly forgotten. When the time comes, the people he kicked, the journalists he attacked, the Archbishop he sued back through, and the town in Tavush that watched him defend the border deal will all remember exactly where to look. Profile #23.
Sources: Parliament.am official MP profile, NATO Parliamentary Assembly delegate listings, Civil Contract internal candidate-selection results, FIP.am investigation into "The Truth" and "C News" Facebook pages (March 2022), Factor.am interview with Aleksanyan and lawyer Arsen Babayan's response (December 2025), Trust Audit findings on Civil Contract 2022 and 2023 financial reports, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan defamation lawsuit filings, Armenian Weekly and OC Media coverage of the August 2021 parliament brawl, RFE/RL Azatutyun coverage of Aleksanyan parliamentary statements on POW trials and Tavush, V.H. Apelian Blog (Vahagn family-background context). All facts cross-referenced via Kali OSINT pipeline March 2026, no false connections asserted.