Азербаийджанская Хилари Клинтон

Друзья прислали статью о Мехрибан Алиевой. К сожалению, на английском, но язык достаточно простой.

Hillary Clinton of Azerbaijan Gets Elected
By Tim Wall

Staff Writer

BAKU, Azerbaijan — Mehriban Aliyeva has a new hat to wear this week, and it’s not from Paris.

Aliyeva — variously described as Azerbaijan’s fashion icon, tireless charity organizer and savvy behind-the-scenes adviser to her husband, President Ilham Aliyev — is about to take her place in the new parliament after officially winning 92 percent of the vote in her hometown district, near Baku.

It is not yet clear what role she will play in the parliament, which was elected in a controversial vote that Western observers said was tainted with widespread irregularities and that the opposition has vowed to overturn.

But it will give her a prominence that few first ladies can boast, and it has invited comparisons to Hillary Clinton, Raisa Gorbacheva and Eva Peron.

Aliyeva, who dresses in the latest fashions from Europe, is also fast becoming an important player in the Byzantine world of Azeri politics, where powerful pro-government clans compete for a slice of the country’s burgeoning oil wealth. Some already see Aliyeva, 41 — an eye doctor by profession — as carving out a role for herself independent of her husband, who has strived to shake off a playboy image since coming to power in 2003.

Some talk of Aliyeva being a future parliament speaker or heading the country’s delegation to the Council of Europe. A few even say she could eventually take over as president to continue the Aliyev family dynasty.

With the highest official vote in all 125 parliamentary seats, her popularity now is sky-high among government supporters, who see in her someone unsullied by the image of corruption that taints many politicians and officials.

One of Aliyeva’s unabashed fans is Sergei Markov, the Kremlin-connected spin doctor who was in Baku for Sunday’s vote. “People love her very much,” Markov said Thursday. “She is extremely beautiful, very smart, and she’s in the strange position of having only a positive image. No one has anything bad to say about her — even the opposition avoids criticizing her.

“She could be like Argentina’s Eva Peron or Hillary Clinton. But in contrast to Hillary Clinton, she is happy in her private life.”

Clinton was elected senator for New York after her husband, Bill Clinton, left the White House.

Markov said he agreed with recent media speculation that Aliyeva had been instrumental in advising her husband to fire his health minister, Ali Insanov, and economic development minister, Farhad Aliyev, who is no relation to the president. Both were fired shortly before the elections and accused of plotting a coup.

Markov said both ministers were “very corrupt.”

Aliyeva “played a very positive role in advising her husband and in helping him to make some important recent decisions, including this one,” he said.

Speculation in the Azeri press that Aliyeva would soon be appointed parliament speaker was dismissed by both government and opposition supporters on Thursday. But both sides agreed that she could take a different high-profile role, perhaps as head of the country’s parliamentary delegation to the Council of Europe.

Anar Mammadkhanov, a senior New Azerbaijan Party deputy and a close ally of the president, said the talk about her taking the speaker’s job was “not serious.”

Representing Azerbaijan in Strasbourg, however, was possible, he said. “She is beautiful, she is clever. If it’s possible for Hillary Clinton, why not for her?”

Asim Mollazade, a moderate opposition deputy, said the election of public figures like Aliyeva was welcome. “She doesn’t have a corrupt image like some bureaucrats. We need new people in parliament, because now it has the reputation of being like Jurassic Park,” Mollazade said.

A large part of Aliyeva’s image is her charity work as president of the Heidar Aliyev Foundation, which was set up last year in honor of the current president’s father, the country’s longtime leader who died in 2003. She is also Azerbaijan’s goodwill ambassador to UNESCO, the educational, scientific and cultural arm of the United Nations.

Pro-government television channels frequently show Aliyeva dishing out the Heidar Aliyev Foundation’s largesse, opening schools for refugee children and distributing badly needed equipment to orphanages.

The work has given Aliyeva “more of a role than simply that of the president’s wife,” Markov said.

It has given her influence, which she used to her advantage in the election campaign. Aliyeva stepped up her charitable activities, particularly in her hometown of Shuvalan and the surrounding towns and villages, where stylish campaign posters showed her silhouette with a single word, “Mehriban.”

The opposition, naturally, does not see her influence as all positive. Murad Gasanli, an adviser to opposition leader Ali Kerimli, said Aliyeva was mixing her charitable work with pork-barrel politicking, and accused her of using the foundation as a “tool of the Aliyev regime.”

“Her election campaign didn’t start in September, it began a year ago with the foundation investing money in that district,” Gasanli said. “Compared with other districts, the amount of activity there is striking.”

Gasanli also raised questions about where the foundation got its money and why it was doing “a job government should be doing.”

“She may display an interest in helping orphaned children, but this is not as important for her as her expensive shopping trips to Paris and London,” Gasanli said. “Her interest in orphanages only appeared a couple of years ago.”

Questions to the foundation’s office in Baku about its work and budget were referred to its press secretary on Thursday. An employee who answered the telephone at the office said the press secretary was unavailable for comment.

The foundation’s web site contains press releases about Aliyeva’s activities, as well as interviews and speeches she has given. No information is posted about the foundation’s sources of funding. The employee said she did not know of any publicly available financial report.

In Aliyeva’s hometown of Shuvalan, an increasingly middle-class suburb 30 kilometers northeast of Baku that has benefited from the country’s recent oil boom, family connections may also have helped in the vote.

Aliyeva’s uncle is Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the United States, and her father is the head of the national aviation academy 10 kilometers down the road.

Local voters on Sunday credited her with improving gas and water supplies, but they were unsure whether the funding had come from the government or from Aliyeva’s foundation.

In Zira, a less-prosperous village in the same election district, Aliyeva’s charity activities appeared to have swung a lot of votes her way. In the week before election day, she paid for a meal at the village mosque to celebrate the end of Ramadan, and promised to get the village’s gas supplies restored.

Mammadkhanov, the New Azerbaijan Party deputy, said the 92 percent win recorded by the Central Elections Commission was “absolutely realistic.”

“She is well-known in the district for her charitable activities. Actually, she doesn’t want to have this high figure, a simple majority would have been enough,” he said.

He shrugged off suggestions that bringing another member of the Aliyev family into the country’s political elite would fuel speculation of nepotism and corruption.

“The parliament does not decide government policy, so there’s no question of corruption,” he said.

Other senior officials also had close relatives who ran in the elections.

Ilham Aliyev’s uncle Jalal ran for re-election, while other candidates included the father of the state customs chief, the son of a deputy prime minister, the brother of the country’s top Muslim cleric and the brother of Baku’s police chief.

Aliyeva’s influence on the future of the Aliyev dynasty may not just be related to her parliamentary career. One of her daughters is engaged to be married to a son of Heidar Babayev, the new economic development minister whose predecessor was jailed in last month’s purge.

Aliyeva’s 8-year-old son, Heidar, named for his grandfather, would be too young to run for the presidency at the end of a second Aliyev term in 2013.

In a country that believes in family and tradition above political labels and parties, some in the opposition said in private that Aliyeva could be well placed to step in and become the country’s first woman president.