By Natiq Jafarli
Baku, September 14, 2025
“Forbidden fruit tastes sweeter – but when it’s unripe, it sticks in your throat.” History teaches a stubborn lesson: whatever the political system, two things resist total prohibition and total control – money and ideas.
Even the harshest regimes failed. In Nazi Germany, anti-Nazi sentiment never fully vanished despite camps, shootings, and arrests. In the USSR, the state tried to choke off both free thought and free trade – with prison terms and even executions for dissent or “speculation.”
It still couldn’t seal the cracks. People mocked official propaganda in their kitchens; “traders” sourced goods from everywhere. Everyone knew who they were – police, prosecutors, judges, even Party elites—because needs don’t disappear when you outlaw supply. Unofficial commerce survived within “rules of the game,” and power often looked the other way.
The same applied to ideas. Publicly, people professed faith in socialism; privately, they rolled their eyes.
Today’s Azerbaijan is relearning that lesson. Attempts to clamp down on both money (business) and ideas (media and speech) have grown – and that is discouraging.
As domestic media turns sterile, topics narrow and bans multiply, audiences drift to overseas insult-driven channels. Interest in those outlets rises precisely because the local space is constrained.
Some of them, I suspect, are tightly entangled with certain officials; the money behind the loudest words may well originate in Baku. Either this is deliberate – turning those channels into profitable levers – or it is shortsightedness. I doubt the latter.
On business, the picture is no better. An official passion for over – regulation and over – control is suffocating enterprise. The state appears to have set itself an impossible goal: to control money completely.
Supervisory bodies multiply; rulebooks mirror the European Union’s most restrictive templates – the very rules many EU entrepreneurs say are throttling competitiveness. First manufacturing faded; now even services limp under layered compliance.
Azerbaijan needs a reset: move – urgently – toward a classic right-of-center economic model. Build a truly liberal (not pseudo-liberal) framework. Establish a small, effective government.
Repeal a thicket of prohibitive and micro-managing regulations. Retire agencies that add more paperwork than value. There isn’t a softer truth behind this one. There is simply no other way.
Editor’s note: This op-ed is adapted from Natiq Jafarli’s Facebook statement; views are the author’s own.
