Azerbaijan: President Aliyev expected to sail to victory in Feb 7th Presidential Elections

• Little intrigue about outcome as key focus still on reasons for calling the early vote
• Aliyev win unlikely to change course of domestic and foreign policy

On December 7, 2023, President Aliyev signed an executive order to hold an extraordinary presidential election on February 7, 2024, instead of October 2025.?Under Azerbaijani law, the president is elected for a term of seven years with no limit on the number of terms in office.

This is the third time that Ilham Aliyev has pulled off the trick of moving the Presidential Elections to an earlier date.?This was done for the first time in 2013 when the elections were moved forward by a week, in 2018 when elections were held six months in advance of the regular schedule, and now when the elections will take place a year earlier than originally planned. It is useful to keep in mind that Azerbaijan is a semi-Presidential Republic, with the President acting as the head of state and the Prime Minister as the head of government. However, the executive power is jointly exercised by the President and the government. President Aliyev has been in power since 2003, winning four consecutive elections, the last one of which in 2018. He has cemented his position with two referendums, one in 2009 that scrapped a two-term presidential limit and another in 2016 that extended the presidential term from five to seven years.

7 candidates will contest the Elections as Constitutional Court must verify final results by Feb 17th. January 8 was the deadline for potential candidates to submit documents to the Central Election Commission marking their intention to run. According to the Central Election Commission, seventeen people wanted to take part in the race but ten of them failed to secure the 40,000 signatures needed to become an official candidate. As a result, seven candidates will run with the notable exception of contenders from the two largest opposition parties, which decided to boycott what the called a "fake election". Given the all-but-known result of the elections, we hereby abstain from discussing individual candidates without loss of generality and focus on the larger issue of the possible underlying reasons for Aliyev's move.

It would be fair to say that the announcement sounded somewhat like a bolt from the blue as there was not per se an obvious reason to call the elections at this particular moment in time.?Ilham Aliyev has been basking in the light of glory in the aftermath of the victorious 3rd Karabakh War. For his countrymen, he is thus a triumphant man who achieved the territorial integrity of the state by returning Karabakh to where it belongs. There also has not been an urgent need to play with deadlines-after all, the requisite changes in the Constitution guaranteeing his position were implemented long ago, so that few would have doubted his rightful claim on the Presidential institution in the country.

Hence, there has been plenty of speculations about the reasons behind that decision.?We outline several of them, including some that have been offered in the internal political discourse in Azerbaijan:

1. Pre-empt the election cycles in Russia and the US as a way of dealing with possible geopolitical instability created in the aftermath of these key global elections: One may plausibly argue that one of the reasons that pushed the current head of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, to hold early Presidential Elections in the country is the unpredictable foreign policy situation in general, including the upcoming election cycles in 2024 in two key countries for Azerbaijan-Russia and the United States. While the results in the former appear easier to predict, those in the former are less obvious. Given the broader narrative in the US vis-à-vis Aliyev, encapsulated in the words of US new Ambassador to Baku at one of his approval hearings in the Congress, that the political regime of President Ilham Aliyev may be dictatorial, one may certainly not rule out the possibility that Aliyev has decided to pre-empt a less friendly global geopolitical backdrop in 2025 by securing his position in the next 7 years now rather than risking conducting elections in a more uncertain and volatile post-2024 backdrop.
2. Nip in the bud any internal opposition and possible destabilization of the situation in the country: This may strike many as quite unlikely given the results of the war, although there is no denying that fact that Azerbaijan has not been able to transform his big war success into exciting economic growth. Although our analysis suggests that, in fact, there has been important positive structural diversification in the country away from the energy sector into the likes of transportation, infrastructure, construction and communications, real incomes have been lackluster in recent years due to high inflation. For example, the head of the opposition Musavat party, Arif Hajili, has noted that usually early parliamentary or presidential elections are held when a crisis situation arises in the country, and clearly there is currently no political crisis in Azerbaijan. Moreover, he has alluded to the fact that two months for holding elections is a very short period for conducting a proper election campaign.
3. Give in to overt US pressure over the conflict with Armenia:?We think it is hardly any coincidence that Ilham Aliyev announced the decision to hold early elections immediately after meeting in Baku the visiting US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs James O'Brien. The latter levied severe criticism at Azerbaijan as recently as Nov 15th, when he stated that there is "no chance of business as usual" after the events of September 19, 2023, and that "Armenia's Nikol Pashinyan appears genuinely interested in achieving peace", thus implicitly suggesting that Ilham Aliyev is not. It may very well have been the case that the 6th of Dec meeting between O'Brien and Aliyev has served to iron out any existing disagreements between US and Azerbaijan with respect to the right process to strike a peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Aliyev's change of heart with respect to his foreign minister travelling to Washington DC to meet its Armenian counterpart and the joint statement of Armenia and Azerbaijan affirming their shared commitment to achieving a long-awaited piece in the region (also issued a day after O'Brien's visit) may be a proof to that. In that sense, Aliyev's election decision may be a direct response to whatever sticks the US administration may have used to prod the Azerbaijani President into compliance.
4. Simply capitalize on the recent war victory and entrench his status as the conqueror of Karabakh.?In this endeavor, Aliyev has without a doubt surpassed both his father and the first two presidents of the republic, whom almost no one remembers today. Therefore, while we suspect the above three possible reasons for Aliyev's decision have their rightful place of existence, the true reason for the early elections may simply be his desire to capitalize on this esteemed glory that inevitably puts him in the annals of Azerbaijani history. After all, the country has changed (and enlarged) its territorial outlines. Moreover, the victory has emboldened Azerbaijan to the extent that has demonstrated its courage to stand up to Europe and the US in claiming to have graduated from a small to at least an average power in the region. Therefore, this may indeed be the opportune time to have the early elections serve as a plebiscite about the support of the first person and trust in him. When even Aliyev's harshest critics cannot deny his role in re-assembling the country, the elections are set to deliver a triumphant win for the President.

We anticipate little change in the course of domestic and foreign policy. As far as the former is concerned, the immediate focus will be on integrating Karabakh into Azerbaijan proper. The government has committed significant financial resources to achieving that goal, with the 2024 budget allocating about 10 percent of total expenditures to the new territories. This, along with the favorable base, will ensure that Azerbaijan will be the only country in the Caucasus and Central Asia enjoying accelerating GDP growth. In foreign policy, Aliyev is likely to maintain his hard-nosed approach to dealing with Armenia, although we foresee increasing chances of some form of a peace agreement being finally signed this year.