Hrant Markarian, the long-serving top leader of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun), announced his resignation on Wednesday more than one month after the party’s failure to win any seats in Armenia’s new parliament.

Markarian made the announcement at the start of a Dashnaktsutyun congress held in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The weeklong gathering is attended by representatives of the party’s chapters in Armenia and other countries around the world having sizable Armenian communities. They are due to debate its new strategy following last spring’s “velvet revolution” that radically reshaped the Armenian political scene. The congress will also elect Dashnaktsutyun’s new main decision-making body, the Bureau.

Markarian has effectively headed the Bureau since 2000. He said on Wednesday that he will not seek reelection to the body.

“We have reached a point where we need to regroup,” he told the congress delegates. “That regrouping also requires certain changes, and I propose to start the first change from myself.”

Markarian reportedly came under renewed fire from dissident Dashnaktsutyun figures in Armenia and the Armenian Diaspora after the party’s poor showing in last month’s snap parliamentary elections. They were said to have claimed that Dashnaktsutyun paid the price for its close ties with the former Armenian government ousted in the revolution.

Markarian blasted the “inner-party opposition” in his speech, saying that it has breached the 128-year-old nationalist party’s “traditions” and “moral concepts.” But he did not name any of his detractors.

The Iranian-born veteran politician also hit out at the current government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, saying that it “doesn’t reflect the mood of the popular movement”

“There is an extremely high risk of a merger of the executive and legislative branches and a strengthening of one-man rule,” he claimed. “With their inexperience, bad governance and poor cadres, the authorities could set the country several years back from its normal development.”

Dashnaktsutyun should therefore aim for removing Pashinian and his political team from power in the next general elections, added Markarian.

Another Dashnaktsutyun leader, Armen Rustamian, similarly stated in November that Pashinian may be trying to “replace old political and economic monopolies with new ones.”

Dashnaktsutyun joined a coalition government formed by Serzh Sarkisian immediately after he was controversially elected president in 2008. It pulled out of the government a year later in protest against Sarkisian’s policy of rapprochement with Turkey. It reached another power-sharing deal with the former president in 2016.

The party, which remains influential in the Diaspora communities in the Middle East, the United States and France, cut a similar deal with Pashinian shortly after he came to power in May. The popular prime minister fired his Dashnaktsutyun-affiliated ministers in October, accusing their party of secretly collaborating with Sarkisian’s Republican Party.

Dashnaktsutyun won less than 4 percent of the vote in the December 9 elections, failing to clear the 5 percent threshold to enter the parliament.