SEPT. 16 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Officially, campaigning in Azerbaijan’s Oct. 9 presidential election kicked off on Sept. 16 although reports from Baku suggested that not many people have noticed.
The election script already appears to have been written. The vote will deliver a third consecutive five-year term for President Ilham Aliyev and the opposition will complain of fraud and an uneven playing field.
Azerbaijan’s economy is booming and living standards are rising, mainly due to energy sales, although opposition and human rights groups complain that this has come at the expense of personal freedoms.
On Sept. 13, Azerbaijan’s Central Election Committee (CEC) barred Ilgar Mammadov from the election. A genuine opposition leader, Mr Mammadov has been sitting in jail awaiting formal prosecution for fomenting anti-government protests in February.
Since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, vote monitors from the EU’s official monitoring unit have never judged an election in Azerbaijan to be free and fair.
And Azerbaijan’s, rather beleaguered, opposition have already complained that Mr Aliyev has been campaigning before the official start, giving election-style speeches and handing out free apartments to journalists.
The CEC officially registered 10 candidates for the election, including Mr Aliyev and opposition candidate Jamil Hasanli. The other candidates are pro-presidential.
In an interview with the BBC on the eve of the election campaign start, Mr Hasanli described Mr Aliyev as an autocrat.
“We wish to move from authoritarianism to democracy through a normal election,” he said. As well as Mr Haslani’s strongly held views on Mr Aliyev, though, it was also clear from the interview that he thought Mr Aliyev would win another term.
ENDS
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(News report from Issue No. 152, published on Sept. 18 2013)