Vafa Nagi is running for parliament as an independent opposition candidate in Azerbaijan's parliamentary elections next month. And she doesn't have any illusions.
"I have no chance to win," she said.
The ruling New Azerbaijan Party, headed by President Ilham Aliyev, along with a constellation of other loyal parties, currently have total control of Azerbaijan's parliament. And in a country where Aliyev maintains an iron grip on the country and elections are routinely falsified, that is unlikely to change after the September 1 vote.
So why run?
In her travels around the area to gather the required 450 signatures to get on the ballot, she has had the chance to talk to many voters, Nagi, a feminist activist and former journalist, told RFE/RL. "You can see that people need someone to tell their problems to, people need someone to care about them," she said.
In regions like her home district of Neftcala, in southeastern Azerbaijan, "people have been completely forgotten by officials," Nagi, said. There are few jobs and infrastructure is crumbling to the extent that salt water from the Caspian Sea has seeped into the municipal water supply, problems to which she says the authorities are indifferent. Campaigning offers "the chance to meet the people, to hear their voice," she said.
Azerbaijani opposition candidate Vafa Nagi
Not everyone agrees that one-to-one communication makes campaigning worth it, and the question of whether to participate in the elections has divided Azerbaijan's opposition.
Boycott
The largest opposition party, the Popular Front Party of Azerbaijan (AXCP), is boycotting, arguing that taking part in the vote gives it a veneer of legitimacy.
"We know that we won't come to power through a boycott," the party's leader, Ali Karimli, told Meydan TV, an independent online news platform, on July 20. "But the question for us now is not how we will come to power, but whether we take part in the government's charade of a fraudulent election, or do we keep our conscience clean?"
Karimli has argued that the party's boycott helps to delegitimize the elections. "The fact that the principled opposition...didn't fit into the configuration that Aliyev created is driving the arrogant regime crazy," he wrote in a July 21 Facebook post.
On August 9, the day the parliamentary election campaign officially kicked off, Karimli reported that the authorities had opened a criminal case against him, which he said was politically motivated.
This will be the seventh straight election that the AXCP is sitting out, including the presidential election earlier this year, where Aliyev won his fifth consecutive term in office.
Another of the largest opposition parties, Musavat, boycotted the presidential vote but is reversing course and taking part in the September parliamentary elections.
The Azerbaijani authorities have opened a criminal case against opposition leader Ali Karimli.
"I don't think our participation will lead to democratic elections," Musavat's leader, Isa Qambar, told Voice of America's Azerbaijani Service. "But there are at least minimal possibilities," he said. In the process of gathering signatures to get on the ballot, the party's candidates have met with thousands of voters and talked to them about important issues in the country, he said.
"This is a certain window of opportunity in a situation where practically all freedoms are restricted, and political activity is extremely difficult," Qambar said. "We are trying to make the most of it."
Accelerated Elections
Azerbaijan has long been one of the most unfree countries in the post-Soviet space, according to international rankings. But lately the country has become even more restrictive. A new media law passed in 2022 and a law on political parties adopted the following year further tightened the space for political discussion. That was followed by a wave of arrests of independent journalists and opposition figures.
In the last parliamentary elections, more than 65,000 local observers took part. But the work of election-monitoring groups has become progressively more difficult. Groups are under increasing financial pressure, and have to register with the Central Election Commission, which restricts who can take part, says Mammad Mammadzadeh, coordinator of the Election Observation Alliance, an Azerbaijani watchdog. "Only pro-government nongovernmental organizations can register," he told RFE/RL's Azerbaijani Service.
Azerbaijan traditionally holds parliamentary elections in November, but at the end of June, President Aliyev announced that this year they would be moved up by two months. Ruling party deputies had argued that the schedule should be changed because Baku is hosting the COP29 global climate conference in November, and the elections could interfere.
But the accelerated schedule also serves the government's agenda of dampening public interest in the elections, says Zohrab Ismayil, the head of the Baku-based Open Azerbaijan think tank. After the campaign officially kicked off on August 9, this year's politicking is taking place in the hottest month of the year, which is "not suitable" for serious activity, he says.
Several nominally independent but pro-government candidates have recently and inexplicably withdrawn their candidacies, drawing speculation that the government forced them to step down. "The government's clear interest," Ismayil said, is that "activism should be limited."
And so the opposition boycott only plays into the government's hands, according to Ismayil. "No political discussion, no political involvement," he said. "Of course, the opportunities for the opposition are very [few], but the boycotting is not increasing these opportunities, only decreasing them."
Still, in the interest of appearing to be pluralistic, the government may "allow" a certain number of real opposition candidates, Ismayil says, to win and enter parliament.
Nagi, the independent candidate in Neftcala, doubts she will be one of them.
Her opponent is the wife of the current officeholder, who has served in parliament for nearly 30 years, and the couple has close ties to the government. Given that she is ignored by Azerbaijan's tightly controlled media, Nagi said that she plans to go door-to-door talking to voters. She will also focus on social media, especially TikTok, which she said is widely used in Neftcala.
Nagi did manage to get elected in 2019 to a municipal council in her home region of Neftcala. But in those elections, there was a single polling place, and she personally stood by the ballot box for 11 hours, live streaming on social media, to make sure it wasn't stuffed.
In her district for the parliamentary race, though, there are 49 polling places. "We would need hundreds of observers," she said.
In the end, her tenure in the city council did not last long: after she pushed the council to be more transparent about its finances, she was the subject of a smear campaign that included posting photos around town of her in a swimsuit. Shortly thereafter, she was expelled from the council on what she says were political grounds.
Now, with a run for a higher office, she says she hopes to call attention to the lack of free elections in Azerbaijan, and to hold on to whatever space for political expression that Azerbaijanis still have. It can always get worse, she said: "We are trying so our country doesn't turn into Turkmenistan."