Azerbaijan’s opposition Republican Alternative Party (REAL) has announced that it will elect a new chair by the end of the month, following the resignation of its chair Ilgar Mammadov for failing to secure a seat in the parliamentary elections.

Mammadov resigned from his position on 11 September following the the Central Election Commission’s (CEC) decision to reject his appeal over electoral fraud in the 1 September snap parliamentary elections. 

He had earlier vowed to resign from his position should he fail to secure a mandate in parliament.

The following day, on 12 September, the Political Committee of the REAL party officially accepted his resignation.

‘It was decided that the transfer of the chairmanship will be completed on 30 September, and the newly elected chair will begin work on 1 October’, read the party’s official statement on Facebook.

According to Natig Jafarli, a member of REAL’s political committee, the party’s new chair will be elected by the committee’s eight members.

‘For now, we are discussing choosing the head of the Political Committee of the party and by the end of the week, we may share our decision’, Jafarli told OC Media. 

While Mammadov is still a member of the Political Committee — along with Jafarli, Mahmud Mahmudov, Elchin Aliyev, Zohrab Aliyev, Toghrul Iskandarli, and current MP Erkin Gadirli — he is not able to run for chair again.

Gadirli was the only member of his party to secure a seat in parliament.

‘If I don’t succeed in the election, I will resign’

In his official resignation announcement on 11 September, Mammadov referenced his promise from November 2023 to resign if he was unable to bring success to the party in the next two elections. 

‘The Central Election Commission, despite all the proof and arguments, rejected my complaint to annul the election results of the constituency, and as I promised last year, I resigned from the head of the REAL party’, Mammadov wrote on Facebook. 

During the snap parliamentary elections held on 1 September, Mammadov ran against incumbent MP Asim Mollazada, a member of the Democratic Reforms Party and one of the members of the suspended Azerbaijani delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Mollazada was later declared the winner of his constituency. 

In the days following the election, Mammadov reported multiple election violations and cases of election fraud in his district.

He additionally claimed that members of the CEC also were involved in the falsification of the elections, posting a video on X allegedly showing two members of the CEC endorsing Mollazada on their social media accounts.

‘The Central Election Commission must address their exposed partisan behaviour by cancelling the voting results for the constituency’, Mammadov said.  

On 4 September, Mammadov posted another video on X, which allegedly showed an election official refusing to issue a sealed copy of the vote tally to an election observer, stating ‘Ilgar has won the elections, how can we alter the results?’. Mammadov wrote in the video’s caption that in the official protocol, Mollazada received six times more votes than he did.

In another post, this time on Facebook, he complained about the falsification of the number of voters.

‘In Nasimi-Yasamal electoral constituency No. 22, according to observers, whom I trust, about 5,000 people voted before 17:00. The official number of the Central Election Commission is 11,997. We will see at the end, that, after two hours the difference decreases or increases’, he wrote. 

15 years as leader of REAL

Mammadov founded the REAL Movement in 2009 after working as a political analyst and reporter and running a popular political blog, and became the party’s leader in 2020 after it was officially registered as a political entity.

In 2013, Mammadov announced he would run for president in that year’s elections. 

Shortly after, he was arrested on charges of ‘organising riots’ and ‘using violence against police officers’ during anti-government protests in the north-western city of Ismailli. Mammadov was sentenced to seven years in prison. 

In 2018, the Shaki Court of Appeals overturned his prison sentence, replacing his two remaining years in prison with a suspended sentence and a travel ban. 

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) repeatedly ruled, in 2014 and 2017, that his detention was unlawful and that the actual purpose of his arrest was to silence or punish him from openly criticising the government. 

In 2018, shortly before his release, the European Parliament published a resolution which stated that Mammadov’s imprisonment was among the ‘most emblematic cases’ of restrictions on political freedoms in Azerbaijan.

In 2020, the Supreme Court of Azerbaijan overturned Mammadov’s conviction and awarded him ₼234,000 ($138,000) in compensation for moral damages. His acquittal was met by scepticism from human rights and opposition activists in Azerbaijan as it occurred shortly after the REAL Party won their first seat in parliament.