CATAPULTED INTO high office by a wave of mass protests earlier this year, Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, enjoyed another big victory on December 9th when his political bloc won over 70% of the vote in a parliamentary election. The former ruling party, the Republicans, received under 5%, less than the minimum required to enter parliament. Mr Pashinyan has referred to the election as the final stage of the velvet revolution that toppled Armenia’s previous government, and promised to use his new mandate to transform the country. Can he do so, and how?

The trigger for the protests that brought down Armenia’s previous leader, Serzh Sargsyan, was his attempt to remain in power by rewriting the constitution and becoming prime minister after ten years as president. The underlying cause was widespread corruption and the damage it had wrought on Armenia’s politics and its economy for decades. Both analysts and ordinary Armenians say that in only seven months Mr Pashinyan has reined in graft. Cabbies in Yerevan say traffic police are afraid to demand bribes. A former president, a former prime minister and the secretary general of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), the Russian-led defence bloc to which Armenia belongs, are under investigation for abuse of power and other wrongdoing. Support for Mr Pashinyan's crackdown increased this summer when police arrested a retired general whose home turned out to be packed with assault rifles, explosives and food donated to soldiers by schoolchildren. Armenians have high hopes for the future, and high expectations of the new government. Property prices in Yerevan this year are up by 20%.

Yet there is concern that Mr Pashinyan might get carried away. Some of his more hard-line supporters demand mass arrests. Senior officials say they will not go after ordinary people and small business owners who dispensed or took bribes but will hold corrupt high officials and oligarchs to account. Mr Pashinyan sounds less conciliatory. The prime minister recently threatened oligarchs and village officials who had made a habit of buying or bullying voters in previous elections. “I will grab you by the throat and throw you out of your offices,” he said. Popular as they might be with many Armenians, the arrests risk damaging the business climate unless they are based on strong evidence, says Hrant Bagratyan, an economist and former prime minister. Foreign investors, whom Mr Pashinyan expects to breathe life into Armenia's ailing economy, are waiting for the dust to settle. One of the biggest projects in years, a gold mine built by an American company, has been on hold for months after the government ordered a new environmental assessment.

One area where no one expects any big changes is foreign policy, which in Armenia is less a matter of choice than of necessity. Mr Pashinyan and his ministers might be tempted to pursue closer ties with Europe and America, but know they are in no position to challenge Armenia’s dependence on Russia. To one side is Turkey, whose forbears presided over the killing of about a million Ottoman Armenians in 1915. To the other is Azerbajian, with which Armenia fought a war amid the collapse of the Soviet empire. Borders with both countries are closed. The one with Azerbaijan remains highly militarised. Many Armenians see Russia, which provides their country with security guarantees, weapons and cheap gas, as their only source of protection, for better or worse. Mr Pashinyan and his supporters have reassured Moscow that Armenia is not on the verge of a geopolitical shift. “The West says that if there’s a democracy movement in Russia’s sphere it has to be anti-Russian,” says Emil Danielyan, an analyst. “Armenia showed this is not true.” Zohrab Mnatsakanyan, the foreign minister, brings up the example of neighbouring Georgia, whose efforts to join NATO have been frustrated for over a decade. “Maybe they can afford a security vacuum for ten years,” he says. "We can’t afford a security vacuum for ten minutes.”