By Vestnik Kavkaza
The re-elected President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev continues to receive congratulations on his victory in the elections not only from politicians of foreign countries but also from the Azerbaijanis. After the announcement of his victory, thousands of people with flags and portraits of the president went to the streets of Baku.
According to Sergei Lebedev, the CIS Executive Secretary who observed the voting, “relations between Azerbaijan and Russia are quite good. This is evidenced by a recent text of greetings to Ilham Heydar oglu Aliyev from President of Russia Vladimir Putin. All the major newspapers, both Russian and Azeri ones, published the text of the greeting, which refers to relations of good-neighborliness, friendship and strategic partnership. It seems to me that these relations will remain at this level, at which they were described by the President of Azerbaijan. This can happen for good reasons. These are historical traditions, close economic ties and good neighborliness. Therefore, if there are any issues that require discussion or coordination, it is usually temporary. Fortunately, there is always a good solution”.
According to Polad Bulbuloglu, the Azerbaijani Ambassador to Russia, “there are 7 flights every day between Moscow and Baku. These are big aircraft, Boeings, seating 170-180 passengers each, so about 1200-1300 people fly between Moscow and Baku daily”.
Speaking about the Azerbaijanis voting in Russia, he said: “The elections took place not only in Azerbaijan, but also here in Moscow, in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, where we have General Consulates. In Moscow almost 1800 people voted, to be precise 1799 in the Embassy of Azerbaijan. More than 1000 voted in St. Petersburg. 171 voted in Yekaterinburg. In Yekaterinburg we have a new General Consulate, they did not have time to gain enough experience. There are many Azeris around there, Chelyabinsk and Tyumen are not far, but still it is not that easy to come and vote. We had a very interesting situation: our voting station opened at 8 a.m. And the voting started already at 8:03. There was a group of students from Vladimir, who came on an early morning train and were waiting for the polling station to open. People were coming from Ryazan, Kaluga, Vladimir and other cities around Moscow by buses or trains to carry out their civic duty. As an old man I was very happy to see that there were so many young people, almost all the students came. It means that the young people understand that they need to carry out their civic duty, that something depends on their vote, that they can take part in defining the destiny of their home country”.
Polad Bulbuloglu spoke about the holiday atmosphere at the elections: “Probably, because the candidate was already chosen, the mood was very happy. An election is a very responsible event. You know, even in Moscow people do not see each other for months, but here they have a possibility to talk, to meet each other, to exchange contacts. I would say it felt like a holiday. Yesterday our committee – it consisted of 6 people – calculated the votes. At our polling station the current president got 92% of the votes cast”.
Vice-Rector of the Plekhanov Russian Economic University, Sergei Markov, who attended the election of the President of Azerbaijan as an observer, acknowledged the full legitimacy of the transfer of power: “During this election there was a clear favorite from the start, and it was clear who would win, and the intrigue was only how much voters would support him. Incidentally, it was also clear from the beginning to almost all analysts who would take second place. The intrigue was largely about the legitimacy of this election. Our conclusion is that the election was fair and expressed the people's will. All politicians could take part in the elections. There were 10 candidates. There was an election campaign, and through the media you could get to know these delegates. It is important that the opposition has risen to a new stage, in the sense that now there was not a personal opposition but a more institutionalized group”.
He called Ilham Aliyev’s victory "peaceful triumph": “Usually in post-Soviet countries the elections are very loud. In Ukraine, every year there are “crucial" elections; in Georgia, every election is like a revolution changing the situation completely, and Russia always causes an uproar outside of Russia. And here we see a unique place, where Western and Russian observers by and large agreed on the fact that this election was free and fair, and in general it reflected the will of the people”.
Among the reasons for such huge support, Markov focused on “unprecedented economic growth”: “Azerbaijan, even now, during the crisis, is growing by 5-6-8 % per year, and this is close to the Chinese rate. Generally, in a way it's like a Chinese model of development or something. People simply do not believe their eyes. They are amazed”.
According to the Russian political scientist, the other reason for Aliyev’s victory was the “serious weakness of the opposition”: “Although there is a single candidate of the national forces, it turned out that each member of the opposition board has his own party project, and they, not risking their party projects, have put forward both times, they had two candidates, people without their own party project to avoid failure. That is, in fact, the opposition put forward not very strong candidates, because they are not thinking about overall victory but about saving their own little party projects. Almost all the leaders of the opposition are former leaders of the Popular Front of Azerbaijan, which had been in power before Heydar Aliyev, which was connected with the defeat in the Karabakh war, poverty etc. And this generation remains the same. This, by the way, means that in the future we will have an interesting intrigue: will there be generational renewal in the opposition? Who will be the new leaders? What ideology will they have? What a political program will they have? Will they be able to defeat the old generation?”
