Azerbaijan election: flawed process, predictable result

Oil-rich Azerbaijan is strategically sandwiched between Iran and Russia, and bordering Georgia, Armenia and Turkey

Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev appears set for re-election in tomorrow’s poll which is being boycotted by opposition groups. They contend that the electoral process is rigged as a result of flawed procedures, media bias, and the harassment and imprisonment of opposition figures.

“The government has not taken the necessary measures to create a democratic, political environment,” says an interim assessment from the Election Monitoring Center (EMC) a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy. The country’s largest nonpartisan NGO supporting free and fair elections, the EMC cites misuse of administrative resources, destruction of campaign materials, and voter intimidation – all violations noted in previous elections.

With voter indifference threatening an embarrassingly low turnout, Aliyev sought to mobilize nationalist sentiment with a verbal attack against Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh. “As long as our territory remains occupied, we carry out politics of all-out offensive against Armenia,” he told a rally two days ago.

Opposition groups claim that energy security interests have led the United States and European Union to ease up on pressuring Baku to liberalize, a strategy they criticize as short-term. “As long as there is no democracy in Azerbaijan and everything is decided by one man, the long-term interests of Europe and the United States cannot be secured here,” said Ali Karimli, head of the Popular Front Party.

Baku frequently highlights its pivotal position between East and West, but it was alarmed at Russia’s invasion of Georgia and resents Moscow’s support for Armenia. President Dmitri Medvedev’s declaration that Russia has “privileged interests” in neighboring states underscored the Kremlin’s ambition to secure a de facto veto over Caspian energy, it was recently argued.

In geo-political terms, Azerbaijan is strategically significant, sandwiched between Iran and Russia, and bordering Georgia, Armenia and Turkey, while Caspian crude and natural gas are seen as valuable alternatives to Russian and Saudi Arabian sources.

The main opposition bloc, Azadliq (Freedom), claims the electoral process is biased in favor of the ruling Yeni Azerbaycan Party. The regime has also announced plans to install 500 webcams in 10 per cent of polling stations, supposedly to boost transparency and ensure against voter fraud.

Issues of torture under policy custody, harassment of human rights defenders, and the imprisonment of journalists for political reasons were raised in a recent meeting of the EU-Azerbaijan parliamentary cooperation committee, according to Brussels-based NGO, Human Rights Without Frontiers.

The election will be “a kind of maturity test” of its strategy of “democratization through modernization,” a Washington DC meeting heard today. The “Old Guard” opposition was unpopular, elitist and out of touch with the wider population, said analyst Elkhan Nuriyev, director of the government-linked Strategic Studies Center. They preferred to “speak to each other, building bad-case scenarios”, addressing the interests of “outsiders” rather than those of the country.

The growth of NGOs would be one benchmark of the country’s evolution “from stability to modernization,” Nuriyev said. But the regime hardly has an encouraging record on nurturing civil society. 

Azerbaijan law requires that NGOs register grants and pay 27% of monthly consolidated payroll into the Social Insurance Fund.  This requirement is imposed on top of an income tax of between 30-35% so that NGOs are forced to pay approximately 60% of salaries in tax.