Editor’s Note: The following op-ed was submitted to the Kyiv Post by a citizen of Azerbaijan who couldn’t publish it by name for fear of prosecution. The Kyiv Post knows the author and deems the person to be credible.
As the world on April 11 nervously awaited the Western allies’ response to an alleged chemical weapons attack on civilians by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, another dictator 1,400 kilometers away in Azerbaijan was quietly consolidating his power.
The long-ruling president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, took an incredible 86 percent of the vote in the first round of the country’s presidential election, winning outright another seven years in the post he inherited from his father, Heydar Aliyev, when the elder Aliyev died in 2003.
The obviously sham election, according to Aliyev, showed that the Azerbaijani people had again demonstrated great confidence in him.
“In this election, the people of Azerbaijan voted for stability, security, development, prosperity, and (showed that they) highly appreciated what has been done over the past 15 years,” he said.
The election had been brought forward by six months (according to the constitution it was to have been held on the third Wednesday of October).
But as is typical for the Azerbaijani leader in election years, before the election the constitution was changed, allowing him another, longer term in office (seven years instead of the previous term of five years, while originally no more than two terms as president were allowed). The constitutional shenanigans were combined with arrests of political opponents.
The election itself was a farce. There were eight candidates, including Aliyev, but six of them actively campaigned for the incumbent president, according to the Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Center or EMDS, a Baku-based nongovernmental organization. The second place candidate, Zahid Oruc, got a little over 3 percent of the vote.
The head of the EMDS, Anar Mammadli, said that Aliyev had merely created a simulation of a real election campaign, using stooge “opponents.”
“Out of eight candidates, six of them were campaigning for Aliyev – that’s absurd,” Mammadli said.
Fake opponents were required because the main opposition parties had decided to boycott the election in protest at it being moved forward.
Aliyev himself did not explain why the election was brought forward. Presidential adviser Ali Hasanov told state news agency AZERTAC that the election was moved to ensure it did not clash with “important domestic and international events” later in the year.
When it comes to rigging elections, Azerbaijan’s president has form. According to the Human Rights Watch report on his first election in 2003, the entire election process was rigged heavily in favor of Aliyev.
“The government ensured that the election commissions were packed with members biased in favor of Aliyev, and it banned nongovernmental organizations from monitoring the vote,” the report reads. “As the election drew nearer, government officials openly sided with Aliyev, obstructed opposition rallies, and sought to limit the public’s participation in them. Police beat and arbitrarily detained hundreds of opposition activists, including a 73-year-old woman.”
After Aliyev was elected for the second time in 2008, he decided to make some changes to the Azerbaijani constitution. In 2009 amendments were passed to “improve the protection of the individual rights and freedoms of Azeri citizens,” and “removing the limitation that a person cannot be elected more than twice to the post of president of the Republic of Azerbaijan.”
That second amendment paved the way for Aliyev’s third term as president, which he duly won in 2013. But long before that “win,” Aliyev started a crackdown on opposition journalists and media outlets.
For instance, in 2008, right after he had secured his second term, Aliyev decided to ban foreign radio broadcasters. The BBC, Voice of America, Radio Liberty and Europa Plus forced to stop broadcasting in the country. The head of the Azeri National TV and Radio Council, Nushiravan Magerammli, nevertheless told the Azerbaijani online newspaper Day.az that the ban “has nothing to do with politics.”
“The issue here is to bring practice in line with legislation,” Magerammli said, without elaborating or clarifying his “explanation.”
However, Aliyev’s determination to hold onto power in Azerbaijan had become clear even in 2005, when Azerbaijani investigative reporter Elmar Huseynov was murdered. Huseynov’s news magazine “Monitor” had been targeted by the government for its critical reporting and had faced harassment. Arrests of journalists, human rights defenders, bloggers, and activists followed Huseynov’s murder.
In 2016 Aliyev made sure that he could be elected president for a fourth time. He decided to call a referendum to make additional changes to the constitution.
As a result, the presidential term in office was extended from five to seven years, and the new office of vice president was created. Aliyev’s wife, Mehriban Aliyeva, was appointed vice president. At the same time, Aliyev abolished the minimum age for presidential candidates, which used to be 35. The 56-year-old Aliyev has three children, two daughters and a son, all currently under the age of 35.
Meanwhile, attacks on journalists and the opposition continued, with some forced into exile and others subjected to the hacking of their email and social media accounts. Opposition media outlets were also targeted.
In 2017, the websites of five media outlets – Meydan TV, Radio Azadliq (RFE/Rl’s Azerbaijani service) the independent newspaper Azadliq, Turan Tv, and Azerbaijani Hour – were blocked.
Nevertheless, Aliyev refuses to acknowledge that there is any curtailing of media freedoms in Azerbaijan.
“All basic freedoms are provided in Azerbaijan, including freedom of the press, which is absolutely free,” Aliyev said in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“About 80 percent of the population of Azerbaijan are internet users, and when the internet is free, without any censorship, and an absolute majority of the population are using the internet, it is difficult to say there is any restriction of the press,” the president went on.
Following the April 11 presidential election, Azerbaijan will continue to have Aliyev as president for another seven years. And from the way things are going, the result of the 2025 presidential election is already not difficult to predict.
