President Ilham Aliyev’s New Azerbaijan Party won 68 of the 125 seats at stake, according to exit polls.
Exit polls show that the ruling party of Azerbaijan is the winner of the early parliamentary elections Sunday. He New Azerbaijan Party of the president Ilham Aliyev got 68 of the 125 seatsaccording to initial results, slightly below the 69 of its previous count.
The rest of the seats went to small pro-government parties o independent candidates. Some 990 candidates were competing for 125 seats in Parliament.
Rovzat Gasimov, vice president of the Central Election Commission of Azerbaijan (CEC), commented on the preliminary results and stated that the stake throughout the country was 37,27%according to preliminary results.
The New Azerbaijan Party has maintained its control of power since 1993initially under the leadership of Heydar Aliyev and now under his son, Ilham Aliyev. His management has been marred by accusations of authoritarianism and repression of dissentwhich has raised concerns about the state of democracy in the Central Asian country.
Electoral advance before the celebration of COP29 in November
The elections were initially scheduled for November 2024. However, at the end of June 2024, deputies asked President Aliyev to dissolve the National Assembly and hold elections in september to prevent it from coinciding with the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29), which will be held in Baku from November 11 to 22.
Despite criticism from opposition parties, the Constitutional Court approved the request on June 27, allowing Aliyev dissolve parliament the next day and set the September 1 as new election date.
These elections come less than a year after Azerbaijani forces recaptured the region of Nagorno-Karabakhwhich had been controlled by ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since 1994. Most 120,000 ethnic Armenian residents of the region they fled in the face of the Azerbaijani military offensive.
