This wasn’t only a good weekend for Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party in Turkey; Azerbaijan’s ruling New Azerbaijan Party also won big in that country’s parliamentary elections yesterday, taking a majority of the seats in the parliament. New Azerbaijan (Yeni Azərbaycan Partiyası in Azeri, a close-ish linguistic relative of Turkish) is the party of President Ilham Aliyev, who has ruled the country since 2003 on a staunchly pro-“Ilham Gonna Get Ilham’s” platform:
The President of Azerbaijan has been compared to a mafia crime boss in US diplomatic cables, and is referred to as a dictator by many analysts. What is clear is that the Aliyev family has been systematically grabbing shares of the most profitable businesses in the country. This year, investigative reports by OCCRP and Radio Free Europe revealed for the first time well-documented evidence that his family has secret ownership stakes in the country’s largest businesses including bank, construction companies, gold mines and phone companies. They also secretly amassed property abroad in places like the Czech Republic.
After an ocean of negativity, which once again poured stinking puddle over the pages of the Western media in anticipation of election in Azerbaijan, the country has replied to all the spiteful critics with facts, which was often the case.
Here are the facts – all observation missions from the EU, US, Russia, Israel, CIS countries, TURKPA (the Parliamentary Assembly of Turkic-speaking Countries), the GUAM (Organization for Democracy and Economic Development), as well as other countries, unanimously agreed that the election was absolutely democratic, transparent and fair.
Yes, all the observation missions who didn’t refuse to observe the vote because they were blocked by the government from doing so properly agreed that everything in this election, in which the opposition wasn’t allowed to have free TV time like the ruling party was, and so eventually wound up boycotting, was just swell. Ah, democracy!
Azerbaijan’s economy is struggling, thanks to low oil prices. Corruption is high, as you might expect in a country whose president has been in office for 12 years and reportedly owns millions of dollars worth of luxury real estate all over the world (wait, no, he doesn’t own that real estate; his 11 year old son does). And Aliyev has a disturbing habit of rattling his saber about war with Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region whenever he needs a little political boost.
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