Azerbaijan’s president wins yet another term

THE last time a presidential election was held in Azerbaijan, in 2013, the central election commission began releasing the results a day before voting had even started. Embarrassed officials blamed a technical glitch. This time round, in the election held on April 11th, officials at least kept up the pretence of democracy by withholding results for a full four hours after the final vote was cast. But the outcome was never in doubt. Ilham Aliyev, who succeeded his father in 2003, won a fourth term with around 86% of the vote.

The result was hardly a cliff-hanger. Both of the two main opposition parties—Musavat (Equality) and the National Council of Democratic Forces—boycotted the election, which Mr Aliyev had unexpectedly brought forward from October. Although there were seven presidential challengers, “all of them were fake candidates”, says Shahin Rzayev, a Baku-based political analyst.

Mr Aliyev is well entrenched. Amendments to the constitution adopted in 2009 scrapped term limits on the presidency. Further changes forced through in 2016 extended its duration from five to seven years. At 56, Mr Aliyev is the youngest of the Eurasian potentates. If anything were to happen to him, his wife, Mehriban Aliyeva, whom he appointed vice-president last year, would succeed him. (The position of second vice-president is vacant, leading some to suspect that he may be grooming his son to fill it.)

The government, doubtless rattled by the Maidan uprising in Ukraine in 2014, has stepped up its repression in recent years. Independent media outlets have been shut down and investigative journalists detained. Over a hundred political dissidents are said to languish in jail. Corruption and cronyism are blatant. A few politically connected families control the vast majority of industries.

Yet Azerbaijan is doing well in some ways. Thanks to abundant oil and gas, its economy grew by an average annual rate of 13% in the decade to 2014, making it the fastest-growing in the world for three consecutive years in the late 2000s. The country of 10m has seen its poverty rate fall from 50% in 2000 to 5% today. Many Azerbaijanis are grateful to Mr Aliyev for rising living standards and political stability in a turbulent part of the world. They also like his tough talk on Armenia, which occupies the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory that Azerbaijan calls its own. But relying on fast-dwindling hydrocarbons is unlikely to be a sustainable model. Mr Aliyev instead wants to turn Azerbaijan into a transit hub on China’s new Silk Road.

The opening of a new railway last October connecting the Azeri capital, Baku, to Kars in Turkey and onwards to the Balkans, means that the shortest route between China and Europe now runs through Azerbaijan. In 2016 two-way trade in goods between China and the EU reached €515bn ($560bn). More than 90% of that trade currently goes by sea, which takes twice as long. Another “north-south” transport corridor is shortly to link Mumbai and Moscow by rail, passing through Azerbaijan. Mr Aliyev started by tapping natural resources buried underground. Now he is latching on to his country’s most valuable above-ground asset: location.