No. 79: Parliamentary Elections in Azerbaijan

This issue of the Caucasus Analytical Digest presents a critical analysis of facets of the Azerbaijani parliamentary elections of November 2015. Farid Guliyev shows that independent members of Azerbaijan’s parliament are not a uniform group, and there are three main subtypes: public figure independents, “fake” independents, and independents vying for public visibility. Inter alia, he posits that non-fake independent candidates have taken up, within the prescribed limits, the job of airing popular grievances and argues that future research should not disregard independents as mere pro-regime puppets if they want to get a fuller understanding of the political dynamics within the electoral authoritarian regimes. Adeline Braux analyzes the campaign for the Azerbaijani parliament of a non-partisan female candidate, who is not related to the dominant party, in a largely uncompetitive election process and thus shows that if such a campaign might seem alternative in its form according to the local context and promising due to the candidate’s social capital, its background remains fairly classical in terms of the approach adopted and the issues raised, while the outcome turns out disappointing. Sofie Bedford posits that elections pose a dilemma for the democratic opposition in electoral authoritarian states. On the one hand, the election campaign is often their only opportunity to get sanctioned access to the public, on the other, through their participation in an election where the outcome is known beforehand they appear to support a democratic charade. Her article focuses on the ways in which oppositional actors in Azerbaijan choose to tackle this predicament in relation to the recent parliamentary elections. Rashad Shirinov deals with the question of democratic legitimacy and analyzes the importance of international recognition of elections for newly independent countries. Taking the case of the November 1, 2015 Parliamentary Election in Azerbaijan, the author looks into the question of why it is so important for the Azerbaijani elites to be recognized as a democracy. Among other things, he argues that the democratic ideal has become “commercialized” and is being used as a tool of hegemony by various bigger states towards smaller ones in international politics.