Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev secured a fifth consecutive term in Wednesday’s election following his country’s historic victory over the previously ethnic Armenian-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh region last year.
92 per cent of voters cast their ballots for Aliyev. Central Election Commission chief Mazahir Panahov declared:
The Azerbaijani people have elected Ilham Aliyev as the country’s president.
Turnout in the snap election, which was timed a year ahead of schedule after Azerbaijan retook the Nagorno-Karabakh region from ethnic Armenians last September, was 67.7 per cent.
Several thousand Aliyev supporters gathered in the streets of Baku on Wednesday night to celebrate his re-election. But Azerbaijan’s main opposition parties boycotted the vote, which Ali Kerimli of the Popular Front party called “an imitation of democracy.”
There are no conditions in the country for the conduct of free and fair elections.
The six other candidates running were obscure and had praised Aliyev as a great statesman and commander-in-chief since he announced the election in December.
Aliyev himself, along with members of his family, voted at a polling station in the Nagorno-Karabakh region’s main city of Khankendi. The re-elected president called the election to “mark the beginning of a new era.”
In 2009, Aliyev amended Azerbaijan’s Constitution to allow him to run for an unlimited number of presidential terms. Human rights activists criticised the move, arguing that it would make him a president for life.
Then, in 2016, Azerbaijan passed constitutional changes that extended the presidential term from five to seven years. Aliyev also appointed his wife Mehriban Aliyeva as first vice president.
Over 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled the Nagorno-Karabakh region as a result of Azerbaijan’s lightning-fast military operation in September, leaving the region virtually uninhabited.
