President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan has formally received one other time period in workplace with 92.12% of the vote, the nation’s Central Election Fee mentioned Friday.
Election screens, nevertheless, have expressed concern in regards to the vote. The Group for Safety and Cooperation in Europe mentioned Thursday that the election passed off in a restrictive atmosphere with no actual political competitors.
Aliyev has been in energy for greater than 20 years. He had known as an early vote whereas he was having fun with a surge in reputation after his forces swiftly reclaimed the Karabakh area from ethnic Armenian separatists who had managed it for 3 a long time. He’s now heading into one other seven-year time period in workplace.
AZERBAIJANI PRESIDENT ILHAM ALIYEV RE-ELECTED IN LANDSLIDE
The election Wednesday, “took place in a restrictive environment and … was marked with the stifling of critical voices,” mentioned Artur Gerasymov, particular coordinator and chief of the OSCE group of election observers in Azerbaijan.
Aliyev was “not meaningfully challenged,” and due to limitations on unbiased media, civil society and different political events, the competition was “devoid of genuine pluralism,” Gerasymov mentioned Thursday. He added that the “near absence of analytical reporting” in Azerbaijani media hampered voters’ potential to make an knowledgeable selection.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev leaves a polling station in Khankendi, Azerbaijan, on Feb. 7, 2024. (Azerbaijani Presidential Press Workplace by way of AP)
Analysts urged that Aliyev moved the election ahead to capitalize on his burst in reputation following September’s blitz in Karabakh. He might be within the limelight once more in November when Azerbaijan, a rustic which depends closely on revenues from fossil fuels, hosts a U.N. local weather change convention.
Aliyev, 62, has been in energy since 2003 when he succeeded his father, who was Azerbaijan’s Communist boss after which president for a decade when the nation turned unbiased after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
Aliyev had declared that he wished this election to “mark the beginning of a new era,” by which Azerbaijan has full management over its territory. He and his household solid their ballots in Khankendi, a metropolis that was known as Stepanakert by Armenians when it housed the headquarters of the self-declared separatist authorities.
The area, which had been identified internationally as Nagorno-Karabakh, and huge swaths of surrounding territory got here beneath full management of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia on the finish of a separatist struggle in 1994.
Azerbaijan regained components of Karabakh and a lot of the surrounding territory in 2020 in a six-week struggle that ended with a Moscow-brokered truce. In December 2022, Azerbaijan began blockading the street linking the area with Armenia, inflicting meals and gasoline shortages, after which launched a September 2023 blitz that routed separatist forces in simply at some point and compelled them to put down their arms.
Greater than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled the area, leaving it almost abandoned.
Aliyev’s time in energy has been marked by the introduction of more and more strict legal guidelines that curb political debate, in addition to arrests of opposition figures and unbiased journalists — together with within the runup to the presidential election.
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Azerbaijan’s two essential opposition events — Musavat and the Folks’s Entrance of Azerbaijan — didn’t participate within the vote, and a few opposition members alleged it might have been rigged.
