Pashinyan is a slight FF for combatting corruption and a better foreign policy then previous Armenian admins. What drags him down is his privatization schemes.
Pashinyan is actually not that different in terms of foreign policy thus far when compared with his predecessors. Both Kocharyan and Sargsyan began their presidencies hoping to break the Russian grip on Armenia and were unable to. They openly bemoaned Russia's inability or unwillingness to more fully back them in their dispute with Azerbaijan, and both made symbolic moves signifying a desire to reach out to the West--Kocharyan attended NATO's 50th anniversary celebration in DC and Sargsyan went so far as to sign onto the EU Eastern Partnership. Armenia's tenuous position (and perhaps the lack of Western acceptance of their semi-autocratic rules) led them to fall back on Russia towards the second half of each of their reins. Russia taking an increasing interest in shoring up its partners after 2000 certainly contributed to this as well. While I hope for the best here, I don't see much changing systemically that would put Armenia into a more neutral or multi-vector position in the near future (though the two obvious possibilities are the collapse of Turkey's relationship with the West and any changes domestically in the Russian Federation).
I can't comment much on privatization... I haven't heard that much about it, and I thought Armenia had already undergone general privatization in the early 1990s, but the track record shows that more centralized and state-heavy economies in the former Soviet Union tend to be more autocratic.
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