Azerbaijan: President Accelerates Election Timetable

On February 5, 2018, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev issued a decree rescheduling the country’s presidential election to April 11, moving the vote forward by six months. No official reason was given for the sudden acceleration of the election timetable.

The ruling New Azerbaijan Party had previously declared its intention to nominate Aliyev for another term, which could extend his presidency until 2025. Aliyev has held power since succeeding his father in 2003. The authority to call snap elections was granted to the president under constitutional amendments approved during a referendum on September 26, 2016. The decision to move the election also followed Aliyev’s appointment of his wife, Mehriban Aliyeva, as first vice president a year earlier.

The opposition criticized the move, with Ali Karimli, head of the Azerbaijan Popular Front Party, telling the Turan news agency that Aliyev’s pursuit of a fourth term is unacceptable. Observers offered varying explanations for the early vote. An analyst, Shahinoglu, suggested the president believed other countries would be preoccupied with their own elections in March and April. Another analyst, de Waal, suggested in a tweet that the accelerated timeline might be designed to avoid potential sanctions from the Council of Europe by releasing opposition figure Ilgar Mammadov only after the candidate registration deadline had passed.

At the time of the announcement, no other candidates had declared their candidacy.