Parliamentary elections are due to be held in Azerbaijan on November 6, and the opposition hasn’t held back in making it known that it intends to attempt a colored revolution in the event of fraud. However, most observers believe that this event will be more violent than velvet, a repeat of the October 2003 street battles between thousands of incited protestors and security forces.

The riots are inevitable, as their basis will be the faulty conduct of the campaigning process and the elections, and they will simply be nowhere near perfect. There will no doubt be an attempted revolution tomorrow. The question is, then, will the opposition succeed in staging a revolution against the Aliyev government? Or is that scenario even desirable for the majority of the people in Azerbaijan?

The Aliyev government is to be faulted for many things, including but not limited to the arbitrary arrest and detention of hundreds of opposition activists and leaders, disallowing “unsanctioned” rallies, biased media reporting on the opposition, less airtime for opposition candidates, harassment of candidates and their families, you name it! The very weeks running up to the elections has probably been the worst of all. Aliyev has promised that the elections will be conducted transparently, but that seems all but impossible given that local officials have proven themselves not to follow such orders.

That said, these elections will be conducted with much more transparency on the official level along with international and internal monitoring by hundreds of organizations. If anything goes wrong, it will be documented. It is a huge step forward since the 2003 presidential election, showing a general goodwill effort at reform that has garnered international support for the government.

This leaves the opposition at a disadvantage. President Aliyev is not an all out dictator. He is thought of as reform minded, and the vast majority of people in Azerbaijan are both content with his rule and optimistic about the future because of good economic times. In essence, they aren’t as willing to see him go as are the radical elements of the opposition.

The West, including the United States and its post-revolutionary friends Georgia and Ukraine, aren’t ready to see him go either. This is for a myriad of reasons, a lot of it due to the strategic oil pipeline that’s about to open which circumvents the Middle East and Russia. Stability is therefore very important for Georgia and Ukraine. Aliyev is also blatantly West-leaning in his policies, and these governments believe that his plan for “evolutionary democracy” is much better for Azerbaijan than “revolutionary democracy.” This certainly seems to be the case, as one can’t expect democracy to come from one single election, and a lot of progess is being seen compared to previous times. This is very comparable to the election in Moldovoa, in which the pro-West President Voronin was seen as being better able to implement reform than the Moscow-leaning opposition.

These developments around Azerbaijan are analogous to those surrounding Moldova’s March-April 2005 parliamentary and presidential elections. At that time, the possibility of a destabilizing “color revolution” against the Western-oriented President Vladimir Voronin was a matter of serious concern to the Rose and Orange leaders in Georgia and Ukraine and like-minded leaders in other capitals. To demonstrate their support, Yushchenko invited Voronin to Kyiv; and Saakashvili, Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Antanas Valionis, and Romanian President Traian Basescu visited Chisinau in quick succession.

Confidence in Aliyev’s policies and the anticipation of credible elections in Azerbaijan on November 6 rest on three main factors: the president’s consistently pro-Western policies, the opposition leaders’ lack of credibility on their own record, and the evident improvements in the conduct of the electoral campaign, compared to an all-too-recent past.

The above article touches on another significant aspect of this election: does the opposition represent what the people want, are their policies west-leaning, and do they even have the credibility to rule effectively? The Eurasia Daily Monitor has an article about Azerbaijan’s radical opposition, which includes the united Freedom alliance of the country’s three biggest opposition political parties. However, there is perhaps the misconception that these people are on the same standard as the pro-democracy orange demonstration in Ukraine. Most of the people financing and running this alliance were politicians during the early ’90s, and were discredited due to their corrupt and turbulent rule. Here is an excerpt from the article, which is worth reading in full, and hints at why Western countries aren’t willing to overtly support regime change in the country.

The radical opposition bloc Azadliq (Freedom) is capturing international headlines through high decibel power and the decade-old political investment into a few of the bloc’s leaders by some Western human-rights groups. In the perception of most Azerbaijani voters, however, Azadliq leaders are indelibly associated with the turmoil of the early and mid-1990s, when they held power and failed the test of statesmanship for the entire country to see. Their overall track record while in opposition is also a discouraging one in terms of political maturity.

The Azadliq bloc is fielding candidates in 115 out of the 125 single-mandate electoral districts. Azadliq is a recent alliance of convenience among three parties. In the highly personalized politics of Azerbaijan, their respective leaders competed against each other no less than they did against the authorities during the past decade. The Democratic Party (DP), Musavat, and the Popular Front of Azerbaijan Party (PFAP).

The DP is a vehicle of the self-exiled (since 1996) former oil-industry chief and ex-parliamentary chairman Rasul Guliyev, who amassed great wealth while in power and harbors presidential ambitions. Guliyev is widely reported to finance the DP, and recently also the Azadliq bloc, from abroad and to retain some inside links to officials from the old Nakhichevan clan. Members of the Guliyev and Mamedov-Jalaloglu extended families operate the DP in Baku. When Guliyev attempted to land at Baku airport on October 17, DP vice-chairman Gurban Mamedov appealed to the people comparing the expected event with the “coming of the messiah” and promising a “place in heaven” to those who would brave the police and reach the airport to show mass support for Guliyev.

Guliyev has declared that he plans to run for president in 2008, and he treats this year’s parliamentary elections as a preparatory stage toward that goal. His allies calculate that his return to the country would spark a political crisis in which Guliyev’s wealth and old contacts would induce some official circles to switch to the opposition’s side. Such calculations seem clearly to overrate Guliyev’s abilities, however. His allies (apart from the DP itself) are presumably sincere in promising to combat corruption, but that promise meets with skepticism while they tie their own political fortunes to Guliyev. Whether this alliance is tactical or strategic is far from certain, considering the ambitions of other leaders in the Azadliq bloc.

Musavat is also a highly personalized party under Isa Gambar, its leader since 1992 and parliamentary chairman in 1992-93. Gambar and his circle do not seem interested in business or economics. In the current electoral campaign, Gambar promises to raise the salaries of public- sector employees to the equivalent of $400 to $500 monthly, if the Azadliq bloc wins the elections, and to give every family a post-election grant of 1 million manats (equivalent to $250) — untenable promises in Azerbaijan’s conditions. Gambar’s discourse is pro-Western at present (and he is a three-time visitor to Washington this year alone), but his past record on this score is less than reassuring. At one time, flirting with Tehran, he advocated routing the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline through Iran (instead of Georgia); at other times his party used pan-Turkic phraseology to please some circles in Ankara; and its propaganda lapsed into xenophobia in looking for hidden Kurdish and Armenian “penetration” of Azerbaijan.

Gambar was officially credited with 14% of the vote in the October 15, 2003, presidential election, and although fraudulent vote counting reduced his score somewhat, there could be no doubt that he had lost heavily. Nevertheless Gambar claimed victory, even before the official results had been announced, in an inflammatory speech from his headquarters’ balcony to the crowd below, touching off violent riots by Musavat supporters that night and the following day in downtown Baku. Quite possibly, nonpolitical criminal elements were the ones responsible for the devastation and plunder that ensued. (Gambar himself famously declared later that he was “drinking tea at home” during the riots.)

But there is also the concern that, should this radical opposition attempt a revolution tomorrow, a government crackdown will drive them even further into radicalization. In this case, it would be in the form of Islamic radicalism. Azerbaijan is known as a relatively secular Muslim country, but too-harsh of a crackdown under the pretense of too-unfree elections could bring this element about. What needs to happen then, in order to prevent this, is to make sure that the elections, barring the obvious problems, generally represent the people’s choices of candidates. While Aliyev remains popular, it is obvious that his party will lose many of its seats this time around. Though it won’t lose the majority, if it doesn’t lose as many as expected, then the opposition will have much more to go on.

There is, however, a more moderate opposition that takes on the notion of “evolutionary democracy” through progressive reforms instead of revolution. So far, the United States’ strategy has been to get enough of the opposition into parliament so that it can work with reform-minded authorities in the government to bring this about. It would therefore be a transition of sorts. The moderate opposition supports this, though the aforementioned radicals tend to pull all the headlines. Vladimir Socor details this keenly.

Azerbaijan’s moderate opposition has been relegated to undeserved obscurity in terms of international media coverage and Western policy assessments of the situation in Azerbaijan. The attention has focused on the radicals because of their confrontational tactics and “revolutionary” phraseology. Meanwhile, the moderate opposition’s Yeni Siyasat (New Policy, YES) bloc is fielding candidates in 69 out of the 125 single-mandate electoral districts. Opposing any revolution for its destabilizing effects, the YES bloc calls for reforms through evolution and public accord.

The bloc’s main programmatic document, “Public Accord on Transition from Authoritarianism to Democracy,” calls for combating official corruption and the clan system, transferring some powers from the President to Parliament; and Azerbaijan’s integration into Euro-Atlantic structures. Such demands parallel those of the radical opposition in their content, but differ from it regarding strategy and tactics. Moreover, unlike the radical Azadliq bloc’s leaders, YES takes the position that evolutionary change is feasible in cooperation with the incumbent authorities, not in confrontation with them. YES leaders underscore the importance of building state institutions, and overcoming the syndrome of leader-oriented political parties.

As the radical opposition gets ready to mount its revolution against the Aliyev government, it seems that it has everyone against them: the West, the moderate opposition, the government, and even the people in general. The West wants to see evolutionary change, which it sees as forthcoming. The moderate opposition agrees, and Aliyev seems to be making the right gestures. As for the people, they seem much more concerned about corruption and poverty than they are about crystal clear elections.

It will therefore be interesting to see if they will be able to get everyone out on the streets that they would need in order to bring about a revolution, but the Aliyev government, in principal backed by everyone else and with loyal security forces, is willing to crack down and shove to the side any attempt at regime change through violent measures. I believe that the OSCE will issue its post-election report similar to the one in Moldova; that, while not completely free and fair, it marked significant progress since the last election season. And, just like with Moldova’s fizzled grape revolution, this one will probably whither as long as Aliyev doesn’t overdo it.