Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev was on course for a landslide re-election win, an exit poll showed on Wednesday, in a vote he called early after recapturing the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia and a crackdown on the media.
Aliyev was set to win with 93.9 percent of the vote, an exit poll conducted among 63,000 people by Oracle Advisory Group showed. Preliminary initial results were expected later on Wednesday.
Aliyev — who succeeded his father Heydar as president in 2003 — has typically taken over 85 percent of the vote in elections that rights groups have said are neither free nor fair. Azerbaijani officials say the elections are fair and transparent, and that Aliyev’s popularity has increased since victory in Karabakh.
Photo courtesy of the Azerbaijani Presidential Press Office via AP
The two main opposition parties are boycotting the poll in the oil and gas producing state, which is to host the UN COP29 climate talks in November. The country’s energy resources are central to Europe’s plans to reduce its dependency on Russian gas following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Baku, a close ally of Turkey, which also maintains working relations with Russia, attributes Western criticism to prejudice against its mainly Muslim population.
In January, Aliyev, 62, told local media that he had called the snap poll to mark “the start of a new era” in Azerbaijan, which he said had restored its sovereignty by retaking Karabakh. He faced six nominal rivals, none of them critical of his rule.
A series of independent journalists have been arrested since November last year in a crackdown on dissent, several of them charged with crimes including smuggling.
International press freedom groups have described the arrests as an attempt to silence anti-corruption reporting.
Aliyev in December last year moved the election from October next year, shortly after Azerbaijan retook Karabakh, an Azerbaijani region whose mostly ethnic Armenian population had been de facto independent of Baku since the early 1990s.
As the Soviet Union unraveled, Azerbaijan lost an extended war with Armenia over Karabakh, a humiliating defeat which Aliyev worked to reverse. In September last year, he said that his “iron fist” had consigned the idea of an independent Karabakh to history.
For Azerbaijan, restoration of control over Karabakh marks a triumphant end to 30 years of intermittent war and a chance for hundreds of thousands of internal refugees to return home.
For neighboring Armenia, the collapse of Karabakh is a national tragedy and humanitarian crisis, with almost all of the region’s 120,000 ethnic Armenians having since fled to Armenia.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
RSS