Azerbaijani voters go to the polls on February 7 for the presidential election. At the helm of the country for more than 20 years after succeeding his father, President Ilham Aliev is a candidate for re-election.

The stakes for this 62-year-old autocrat: a fourth consecutive term at the head of this small Caucasian country, rich in hydrocarbons – and his second seven-year term since the constitutional reform of 2016, increasing the presidential mandate from 5 to 7 years.

The February 7 election was initially scheduled to take place in 2025. The previous one, in 2018, saw the victory of President Aliev with 86% of the votes. But the Azerbaijani head of state announced that he would bring forward the date to February 7, 2024 via a decree published at the beginning of December.

France 24 takes stock of the issues at stake in this presidential election with Anita Khachaturova, researcher at the Center for Studies and Political Life at the Free University of Brussels, and specialist in relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

France 24: Has Ilham Aliev seen his power strengthened compared to the 2018 election?

Anita Khachaturova

 : Since the 2018 election, there has been the war in Nagorno-Karabakh and the resumption by Azerbaijan of the entire territory disputed since the end of the 1980s with Armenia. Part of the territory had already been taken back in 2020. The rest was taken back a few months ago, in September 2023, and forced the Armenians who lived there to leave, in what amounts to ethnic cleansing.

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This is a key and symbolic victory for President Aliyev. He presents himself as the man who restored dignity to the Azerbaijani people and who washed away the affront of humiliation and occupation inflicted by the Armenians on Azerbaijan. This victory in Nagorno-Karabakh thus came to confer new legitimacy to the position of the president in the eyes of the Azerbaijani people: this providential figure who restored the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.

But we must understand the specificity of the Azerbaijani political regime when we talk about the February election. Azerbaijan is a very repressive autocracy. The NGO Freedom House (which works to defend human rights and promote democratic change, Editor's note) ranks Azerbaijan among the worst states in terms of political rights and freedom. Elections in Azerbaijan are not like those we are used to seeing in democratic countries, European or otherwise. It is simply a plebiscite in favor of the president which allows him to be part of a sort of political legitimacy on an international scale, but which has very little to do with democratic legitimacy.

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It should be remembered that Ilham Aliev inherited power in 2003 after the death of his father. The latter had already governed the country from 1993, and was the head of the KGB in the 1960s in Soviet Azerbaijan. It is therefore a family which has governed the country almost uninterruptedly since the end of the 1960s. It is also a clan system which manages the country like a business. All the country's resources are monopolized by this family and their relatives.

Why was the presidential vote brought forward to February

?

Building on this victory in Nagorno-Karabakh – a victory that President Aliev personally claims – these early elections can be perceived, from the outside, as a desire to consolidate this popular base from which he thinks he benefits, and from which he probably benefits ( the war in Nagorno-Karabakh does not meet opposition even among critics of the regime, with the exception of a handful of extremely marginalized pro-peace activists). But this popularity is difficult to assess or estimate independently given the Azerbaijani political context.

Ilham Aliev is also engaged in a logic of permanent threats against Armenia and annexationist desires and this re-election can also serve to support future military campaigns against the sovereignty of Armenia. It is also accompanied by extreme repression against the few independent journalists and activists who, by evoking societal problems in the country, are seen as tarnishing the victory in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Is there any opposition to the president candidate for this election

?

There is no opposition, freedom of the press or opponent strictly speaking. There is a dramatization of the presidential campaign. For example, we recently saw it in debates organized on Azerbaijani television and which were mocked by the population, particularly on social networks.

There is very little credibility given to this election. There is no uncertainty about the outcome of the vote. We know that Ilham Aliev will be re-elected.

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