Since the middle of February I have been living in Azerbaijan, one of the three Southern Caucasian states. It is a particularly interesting time: the government has put forward almost 30 changes to the constitution and has called for a referendum to take place on the 18th of March. The changes are largely innocent, except for a couple, which unfortunately promise to take Azerbaijan even further down the road of authoritarianism. The changes include a ban on elections in times of war (a rather tricky concept, considering that Azerbaijan is actually still at war with Armenia), the abolition of presidential term limits (knowing that the current leader, Ilham Aliev, is the son of the former learder Heydar Aliev, this seems to many another move towards a monarchy) and the ban on taking pictures or making video materials of people without their prior consent (which is generally considered as further restricting the already severely limited press freedoms).

Nobody whom I have met so far expects the referendum to fail, as the government has become too sophisticated in ensuring that all public voting follows its own wish. It is still trying to keep up some sort of democratic facade of the kind of electoral authoritarianism that have become the dead-end road of so-called 'transitional democracies', but I doubt anyone who takes even a quick look at it will fail to see what it actually is.

Deleting limits to presidential terms has recently become very popular, with previous cases in Russia and of course Venezuela. It is important to keep on speaking out against such erosion of democracy, as they only facilitate further concentration and monopolization of power.