On February 7, the Azerbaijani head of state, Ilham Aliev, 62, will offer himself a fifth term, against a backdrop of fierce repression of independent media and the threat of slamming the doors of European institutions. Some 6.3 million voters are called to the polls to choose between a quasi-monarch who inherited the presidency in 2003 from his father, Heydar Aliyev, and six other candidates vying to ensure that no citizen votes. for them.
“Voters have turned away from politics to an unprecedented degreeexplains exiled political scientist Bahruz Samadov. This can be explained by the real popularity of the outgoing president, Ilham Aliev, who boasts of having restored Azerbaijan’s sovereignty in Nagorno-Karabakh, but also by the intensification of repression during the electoral campaign. »
At the end of September 2023, a military operation launched by Baku caused the flight of more than 100,000 people from Nagorno-Karabakh, almost all of the Armenians living in this region. For three decades, the enclave had been administered by a separatist entity allied with Armenia and beyond the control of Baku. In 2020, Azerbaijan had already taken back a large part of it by force, inflicting a bitter and murderous defeat on the Armenians.
Wishing to convert the military victory into a plebiscite, Ilham Aliev brought forward the date of the vote by a year, while toughening repression against critical voices. Ten journalists have been arrested by the authorities since November 2023.
“We will not participate in this circus”
During the previous presidential election, in 2018, the opposition managed to organize several massive demonstrations in Baku. In mid-December 2023, the two main opposition parties, Müsavat and the Popular Front of Azerbaijan, decided to boycott the vote. “We will not participate in this circus, this false election which is only a simulacrum of democracy”, declared the leader of the Popular Front, Ali Karimli, during his party’s convention. According to the American organization Freedom House, Azerbaijan ranks among the sixteen countries offering the fewest civil liberties and political rights in the world, alongside Burma and Yemen.
The deterioration of the political system did not escape the attention of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which sent eleven observers to the presidential campaign. In an interim report published on its website, the OSCE notes “the absence of real competition, government pressure on the media and obstacles to the monitoring of elections by public bodies”. She also notes that, “of the six presidential candidates other than the incumbent president, all have publicly supported the president in the recent past”.
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