Bloomberg: Ilham Aliyev faces Hosni Mubarak’s fate

PanARMENIAN.Net - Azerbaijan’s political opposition is seeking to replicate the uprisings that drove out authoritarian rulers in Egypt and Tunisia, this time in a former Soviet oil province that supplies an increasing share of Europe’s energy.

President Ilham Aliyev, who took over from his father in 2003 in the first dynastic succession in the former Soviet Union, faces the same fate that befell Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak last week if he doesn’t annul the November election that gave his supporters all but one of 125 seats in parliament, said Isa Qambar, head of the Musavat, or Equality, political party.

The Aliyev family has dominated Azeri politics for 40 years. Heydar Aliyev, father of the current leader, became president in 1993 after serving as the Kremlin’s local Communist Party boss from 1969 to 1982. His son, 49, scrapped a two-term limit in 2009, allowing him to stay in power indefinitely.

Azerbaijan is more corrupt than Tunisia and Egypt, according to Transparency International, which in 2010 ranked the country 134 out of 178 on its global corruption index, compared with Tunisia’s 59th place and Egypt’s 98th, Bloomberg reported.