PRAGMATISM COMES OUT ON TOP

The results of the elections to Azerbaijan's Milli Maclis (parliament) did not come as a surprise to anyone. Even before the election campaign had started, almost all the analysts forecasted a confident victory for the ruling party and there were sufficient grounds for that. But we'll come back to that a bit later.

So, on 1 November Azerbaijan elected its parliament of the fifth convocation. According to preliminary data, 55.7 per cent of the electorate went to the ballot box to vote for the candidate of their choice.

The elections went off calmly, without incident, and, what is most important, without any violations. The Central Election Commission reported this. It was also confirmed by the observation missions, including from the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States], PACE [Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe] and BSEC [Black Sea Economic Cooperation], and from the parliaments of Great Britain, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and many other countries. 

Incidentally, more than 500 international observers and approximately 70,000 local people engaged in public life were observers throughout the voting for the parliamentary elections.

The OSCE [Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe] refused to send their mission to Azerbaijan, although official Baku applied to that organisation as always.

Failing to see a speck of dust in your own eye 

The OSCE's Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) had planned to land a force of 400 people in Baku, and in Azerbaijan they were not particularly opposed to such a large number of observers. We still haven't seen something like that they say in hospitable Baku, which hosted millions of visitors who came to the First European Games just last summer. But, for some reason, when Baku questioned the need for such an unprecedented number of observers from just one organisation, at the OSCE they "got offended" and decided to cancel their business trip.

"It is the obligation of the OSCE's Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights to act as observers at elections. As you know, we invited them and asked them to explain the method by which they determine the number of observers to go to individual countries. Instead of answering us they decided not to send any observers at all," Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev stated, after calling the organisation's actions unacceptable.

The head of the Azerbaijani state stressed that, having taken the decision not to observe the elections unilaterally, the OSCE's ODIHR had broken its own rules and regulations.

But why do you need regulations if you have to apply the notorious double standards? "We asked why there were so many observers in Ukraine with a population of 45 million, but in Turkey where 80 million people live, they sent only 18 people," the Russian media reported the words of the speaker of the Azerbaijani parliament of the fourth convocation, Oqtay Asadov. "They replied that as it was like that, they would not send any observers at all…"

Most observers link this inappropriate behaviour on the part of a European structure with the independent foreign policy of Baku which did not blindly join the European Union's integration programmes in spite of its own national interests. The Russian media and experts are adding to this Azerbaijan's reluctance to support the sanctions against Moscow.

It is worth remembering that Azerbaijan did not make any high-flown promises to the West regarding European integration like Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova did. Incidentally, in this connection the "Kommersant" newspaper quotes the words of its source, an anonymous diplomat from one of the European countries, on the current leader of Azerbaijan's "lack of an alternative": "I am going to tell you something that many of my colleagues may not agree with, but you can't get away from the facts. Compare Azerbaijan whose authorities are regularly criticised in Europe for authoritarianism, and the other former Soviet countries - Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine - where from the point of view of democracy the situation is kind of better. But there they have a lower standard of living, shocks and sometimes even a war. Here there is stability and predictability, in spite of such a delayed-action mine like Nagornyy Karabakh. But even with regards to this conflict Ilham Aliyev has on the whole kept the situation under control: the exchanges of fire and fighting along the line of contact have not resulted in a broad-scale conflict for the moment. I hope that they won't do." So, this is the secret of the victory of Ilham Aliyev's party at all the elections one after the other.

Why the ruling party?

The president's high rating, the political and economic stability, the public services' programmes, the flexible reaction to the challenges of the world economy and many other things… Even when world oil prices dropped drastically, Ilham Aliyev did not reduce the expenditure on public services' projects in the state budget for 2016. In order to ensure that incomes keep coming into the treasury, in the last month alone the head of state has taken a number of decisions to support the oil business which all the analysts have called revolutionary. Among them there is the drastic reduction in licenses for entrepreneurial activity and simplifying the procedures to obtain the remaining two-year holiday from checks by various state structures, permission for duty-free imports of goods for personal use worth 10,000 dollars and so forth.

"After the recent drop in oil prices we have been faced with the problem of how to keep the treasury coffers topped up. Several sources were decided upon to extricate ourselves from this situation. Firstly there are foreign investments which Azerbaijan easily obtains because it has a good credit record as they say. At the present time, we top the CIS for the amount of foreign investments we have attracted. Secondly, the state has stopped all checks on business, such as anti-monopoly, tax and hygiene for a two-year period… Now you can open a new business in two days, after submitting six or seven documents at a single counter," Deputy Minister of the Economic Development Sevinc Hasanova told the [Russian] "Argumenty I Fakty" newspaper.

The promising spheres include agriculture, tourism, information technology and construction. But other branches in the non-oil sector are not being left on the sidelines either. "We cannot afford to be picky when we have a crisis on our hands!" Rufat Mammadov, president of the Export and Investment Promotion Foundation (AZPROMO) said.

On the whole, since 2005 the country's economy has grown three-fold and the budget has risen 15-fold. Wages have increased correspondingly, unemployment has fallen and the poverty level has dropped to a minimum. This could not fail to influence Azerbaijani voters' preferences at the elections.

What assets do the opposition have?

Twenty-two parties vied for deputies' seats in the fifth parliament, seven of them from the "Azadliq-2015" ("Freedom") bloc. Altogether 767 candidates, almost half of whom were independents, competed for 125 seats in the Milli Maclis. They were the ones mainly competing against the ruling party. Foreign observers state that different conditions for attaining success were created for the participants in the election marathon.

In spite of this, the radical wing of the traditional opposition decided to boycott the elections. Moreover, they declared the elections unlawful long before the election campaign started. The conditions for campaigning and voting were not to the liking of this part of the opposition, but even the European organisations that were not all that favourably disposed towards the authorities did not have any complaints on this score.

Moreover, those boycotting the elections preferred to keep quiet about their possibilities, not to mention their differences, the splits in their ranks and the electorate's loss of trust in them. For it is hardly likely that the Popular Front Party would be able to recover after the recent major split. Although "Musavat" joined the election race, it decided to give up the fight right before the end of the campaign. It evidently also understood that the party was considerably weaker after the leading functionaries and their supporters left it.

Ilham Aliyev did not in fact leave any gaps in his policy that the opposition could fill with promises to the electorate. You cannot deceive people with the demagogy of European democracy now. Firstly, the years of the romantic ideas with regard to Europe have long gone. People have become more pragmatic and you can't tempt them with nice ideas any more. Secondly, the sorrowful experience of exporting European democracy to Ukraine is still absolutely fresh in their memory.

"Quiet" elections

Thus in circumstances where the radicals inevitably removed themselves, the current parliamentary elections were fairly "quiet". Some observers were even surprised that there were no rallies out in the streets, that there were no posters stuck on the pillars and no debates shown on television. The fact is that, in compliance with Azerbaijani legislation, in order to gain free air time, no less than 60 candidates have to stand from the 125 constituencies. Only "Yeni Azerbaijan" could put forward this number of candidates. It did put forward that many candidates, but turned down the air time, because the ruling party regarded it as unethical to take advantage of a monopolistic position.

At the same time, serious passions raged on the Internet. For the first time in the history of the Azerbaijani elections the election campaign was fought mainly on the social networking sites and not on the television, in the newspapers and on the streets. No-one cancelled the traditional meetings with the electorate either. 

Although it appeared to an outsider that the election campaign seemed a quiet one on all counts, owing to the absence of people shouting in the streets and police cordons, speakers throwing glasses at each other during television broadcasts, the Azerbaijani voter had sufficient information to make a choice. And he did make his choice.

Judging by the preliminary results announced by the Central Election Commission, the ruling party fulfilled its programme on a minimum level, almost copying the result of the previous parliamentary elections. In the parliament of the fifth convocation the party in power will be represented by 69 deputies. The remaining 55 seats will be divided up among the opposition, with independent deputies making up the majority. Moreover, 26 people will be receiving deputies' mandates for the first time.

The organisations conducting exit-polls at the polling stations confirmed the preliminary results in the elections. Among them there was the Azerbaijani "Ray" ("Opinion") Monitoring Centre, and "ELS", the American Arthur J. Finkelstein & Associates (AFJ) organisation and the French "Opinion Way".

So, the deputies' seats in the Milli Maclis did not remain empty for long. The Azerbaijani parliament of the new convocation is to assemble immediately after the election results have been confirmed by the Constitutional Court, which should not take more than one month according to the law.