The EconomistApril 14th 2018 Europe 472 Turkish prosecutors have charged them
with espionage: Alexis Tsipras, the Greek
prime minister, compared Mr Erdogan to a
sultan and accused him of turning the men
into hostages. Turkey has repeatedly
leaned on Greece to extradite eight Turkish
soldiers who fled across the Aegean after a
botched coup in 2016.
With help from rabble-rousers on both
sides, disputes over airspace and maritime
borders, which have poisoned relations
between Greece and Turkey for decades,
are doing so again. A row over a pair of un-
inhabited islands in the Aegean, which
nearly caused the twoNATOallies to go to
war in the 1990s, flared up in February
when a Turkish ship touring the area col-
lided with a Greek vessel. More recently,
Greek fighter jets intercepted a Turkish
drone hovering above Rhodes. The accom-
panying polemics have not helped. Tur-
key’s prime minister has warned the
Greeks to stop “pretending to be pirates”.
Mr Erdogan, eager tosustain a nationalist
frenzy ahead of elections scheduled for
next year, invoked a Turkish victory over
an invading Greek army in 1922. On April
4th the Greek defence minister said his
country would “crush” any Turkish incur-
sion and announced the deployment of
7,000 additional troops to the border.
The discovery of natural-gas reserves in
the eastern Mediterranean, once hailed as
a key to peace in the region, has raised the
stakes, pitting Turkey against a number of
countries in addition to Greece. Turkey has
already disrupted plans by Cyprus to de-
velop some of its offshore fields. Earlier
this year, its warships blocked a rig owned
by an Italian energy company from drilling
for gas east of the island, which is divided
between the internationally recognised
Greek-Cypriot south and a breakaway
Turkish-occupied north. (Turkey, the only
UNcountry not to recognise Cyprus, does
not acknowledge its maritime borders.)
Turkey has also clashed with Egypt, which
recently agreed to develop some gasfields
in co-operation with Cyprus.
Plans to build a pipeline delivering Is-
raeli and Cypriot gas to Greece, already un-
der commercial scrutiny, now face rising
geopolitical tensions, says Matt Bryza, a
former White House official. A project con-
necting Israel with Turkey is also on ice,
with the two governments at odds over the
situation in Gaza and the status of Jerusa-
lem. (At present, Israel seems more likely to
export its offshore gas to Jordan and
through Egypt.) Turkey’s gunboat diplo-
macy is deepening its isolation. “There’s a
new axis emerging between Egypt, Israel,
Cyprus and Greece to confront Turkey,
which they believe is breaching interna-
tional law,” says Mehmet Ogutcu,an ener-
gy expert. “Turkey feels there is aconspira-
cy to cut it off from the Mediterranean.” A
violent confrontation at sea, by accident or
design, may only be a matter of time. 7
T
HE last time a presidential election was
held in Azerbaijan, in 2013, the central
election commission began releasing the
results a day before voting had even start-
ed. Embarrassed officials blamed a techni-
cal glitch. This time round, in the election
held on April 11th, officials at least kept up
the pretence of democracy by withholding
results for a full four hours after the final
vote was cast. But the outcome was never
in doubt. Ilham Aliyev, who succeeded his
father in 2003, won a fourth term with
around 86% of the vote.
The result was hardly a cliff-hanger.
Both of the two main opposition parties—
Musavat (Equality) and the National
Council of Democratic Forces—boycotted
the election, which Mr Aliyev had unex-
pectedly brought forward from October.
Although there were seven presidential
challengers, “all of them were fake candi-
dates”, says Shahin Rzayev, a Baku-based
political analyst.
Mr Aliyev is well entrenched. Amend-
ments to the constitution adopted in 2009
scrapped term limits on the presidency.
Further changes forced through in 2016 ex-
tended its duration from five to seven
years. At 56, Mr Aliyev is the youngest of
the Eurasian potentates. If anything were
to happen to him, his wife, Mehriban Ali-
yeva, whom he appointed vice-president
last year, would succeed him. (The position
of second vice-president is vacant, leading
some to suspect that he may be groominghis son to fill it.)
The government, doubtless rattled by
the Maidan uprising in Ukraine in 2014,
has stepped up its repression in recent
years. Independent media outlets have
been shut down and investigative journal-
ists detained. Over a hundred political dis-
sidents are said to languish in jail. Corrup-
tion and cronyism are blatant. A few
politically connected families control the
vast majorityof industries.
Yet Azerbaijan is doing well in some
ways. Thanks to abundant oil and gas, its
economy grew by an average annual rate
of 13% in the decade to 2014, making it the
fastest-growing in the world for three con-
secutive years in the late 2000s. The coun-
try of 10m has seen its poverty rate fall
from 50% in 2000 to 5% today. Many Azer-
baijanis are grateful to Mr Aliyev for rising
living standards and political stability in a
turbulent part of the world. They also like
his tough talk on Armenia, which occupies
the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory
that Azerbaijan calls its own. But relying on
fast-dwindling hydrocarbons is unlikely to
be a sustainable model.Mr Aliyev instead
wants to turn Azerbaijan into a transit hub
on China’s new Silk Road.
The opening of a new railway last Octo-
ber connecting the Azeri capital, Baku, to
Kars in Turkey and onwards to the Balkans,
means that the shortest route between
China and Europe now runs through Azer-
baijan. In 2016 two-way trade in goods be-
tween China and the EU reached €515bn
($560bn). More than 90% of that trade cur-
rently goes by sea, which takes twice as
long. Another “north-south” transport cor-
ridor is shortly to link Mumbai and Mos-
cow by rail, passing through Azerbaijan.
Mr Aliyev started by tapping natural re-
sources buried underground. Now he is
latching on to his country’s most valuable
above-ground asset: location. 7Azerbaijan’s electionStayin’ Aliyev
The president wins yet another term,
thanks in part to geographyBooming Baku