BAKU: Drenched in oil wealth, wallowing in corruption and lauded by the United States, Azerbaijan votes on Wednesday in a presidential election that real opponents of incumbent Ilham Aliyev have opted to boycott.

That the 46-year-old Aliyev, son of the Caspian state’s previous president Heydar Aliyev who dominated political life here for more than 30 years, will get a second term is a foregone conclusion, experts say.

Indeed the only suspense surrounding the vote is how Aliyev will navigate the increasingly choppy waters between Russia and the United States as each turns up the heat in vying for the allegiance of the oil-rich, strategic state.

In addition to the current president, there are six other people each loyal to Aliyev whose names are to appear on the ballots in what analysts have termed ‘the most insipid’ vote here since the 1991 Soviet collapse.“The main worry for the authorities is that Aliyev’s score does not appear indecently high,” commented Rasim Musabayov, an independent political expert.

“The opposition that appeared following the collapse of the Soviet Union has wilted over the past 17 years” and today “prefers to be simply against the power rather than for a single candidate”, Musabayov said.

Apart from the odd photograph of a candidate pasted onto a shop window here and there, there are few outward signs in the capital that a presidential election is about to take place.

Though he has declined to debate any of the other contenders, Aliyev can be assured his every public word and deed will receive lavish coverage on the country’s television networks, all more or less run by the state.

And rather than criticise Aliyev himself, the other candidates have opted to attack the faceless bureaucrats that surround him on the grounds that those aides are impeding the president from implementing his plans in full.

“The people of Azerbaijan have plenty of good reasons to re-elect Ilham Aliyev,” presidential adviser Ali Hasanov said.

He pointed to the ongoing and widely-praised renovation of the country’s clapped-out infrastructure and the fact the number of people living below the official poverty level has dropped from half to 16 percent in five years.

Aliyev’s administration has pledged to eradicate poverty altogether by 2013 in this country of eight million inhabitants where the average monthly salary is $247. The World Bank recently saluted Azerbaijan’s astonishing economic growth, which topped 34 per cent in 2006 and 26 per cent last year rates far higher than most of the world’s economic success stories of recent years.

This rosy picture however is, according to experts, obscured by endemic corruption.

Of the 180 countries in the world surveyed by the independent corruption watchdog Transparency International this year, Azerbaijan ranked among the most corrupt, in 158th place.

On a visit earlier this month to Baku however US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte underscored Washington’s ‘deep and abiding’ commitment to Azerbaijan and other former Soviet republics in the Caucasus once firmly in Moscow’s orbit.

“There has been considerable progress on the path towards democracy by this country,” Negroponte said, according to a transcript of his remarks provided by the US embassy in Baku.

For Isa Gambar, a longtime opposition figure now banned from appearing on television, the United States and Europe are less interested in fair political play in Azerbaijan than they are in securing the country’s energy resources.

“If they continue to close their eyes to the increase in authoritarianism in order to obtain energy contracts, one day all the taps will be controlled by Moscow,” Gambar said.

Like other genuine opponents of Aliyev, Gambar explained he had chosen to keep out of the election altogether rather than to take part in a no-win gambit and in doing so give the vote “the appearance of a pluralist election”.—AFP