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.
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