Azerbaijan more authoritarian than ever since independence: de Waal

PanARMENIAN.Net - The oil boom—which boosted Azerbaijan’s economy, consolidated the country’s statehood, and gave it a new international profile—has ended, British journalist and writer Thomas de Waal said in his new article published on the website of Carnegie Europe.

“The country’s leaders have more limited financial resources to offer a society that is not as politically quiescent as it was a decade ago and where new forms of opposition, such as political Islam, are slowly emerging,” de Waal said.

“…If Azerbaijan’s wider elite does not find a new sense of humility to bridge a large gap between rulers and ruled, the country almost certainly faces political turbulence.”

Azerbaijan is currently more authoritarian than at any time since it achieved independence in 1991, the author says.

According to him, Since Ilham Aliyev’s third term as President, Azerbaijan has become a much more closed and tightly controlled state based on the Central Asian model.

The fact that Aliyev is serving a third term at all follows a controversial 2009 change to the constitution abolishing term limits.

A new constitutional referendum on September 26 confirmed a further extension of the presidential term from five to seven years. These changes could prolong Aliyev’s personal rule almost indefinitely.

“The turn to more authoritarian rule can in part be attributed to the ruling regime’s fears about a contagion effect from the Maidan uprising in Ukraine and the revolutions in the Middle East. In 2013, the younger Aliyev launched a political crackdown on dissent that was harsher than anything carried out by his KGB-schooled father. It began with the jailing of Ilgar Mammadov, the leader of the pro-Western opposition Republican Alternative (REAL) party who had been planning to run in the presidential elections. Later, many more pro-democracy activists and government critics were jailed, and Western organizations operating in Azerbaijan were closed. In parallel, Azerbaijan restricted its engagement with Western countries to a narrower agenda of energy and security issues and strengthened its relationship with Russia. The drastic economic downturn in 2015–2016 was also the occasion for rethinking relations with the West, but the new model has remained essentially unchanged,” de Wall says.