In Azerbaijan, the early presidential election on Wednesday February 7 was without surprise. President Ilham Aliev, 63, who took over as head of the former Soviet republic in 2003, would have been re-elected with more than 90% of the vote, according to provisional results. He was seeking a 5th consecutive term. Mr. Aliev voted in Khankendi, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, a province which has just been reintegrated into Azerbaijan, but was completely deserted by its more than 100,000 inhabitants, Armenians, who preferred to flee at the end of last September rather than live within the Azerbaijani regime.
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With our correspondent in Tbilisi, Régis Genté
The election should have been held in the spring of 2025, but at the beginning of December, President Aliev announced this early election.
To justify the shake-up of the electoral calendar, President Aliev invoked the country’s entry into a ” new era “. Reference to the reintegration of Nagorno-Karabakh within Azerbaijan, after the war, and the victory, of 2020, and the offensive last September in this province populated by Armenians which had escaped its control for three decades.
It is also in the capital of Karabakh, which has regained its Azeri name Khankendi, that the head of state voted this Wednesday.
For the rest, the election was like all the others since 1991 and the independence of the Azerbaijani Republic, namely the antipodes of a free election.
The opposition boycotted this presidential election, judging that it did not have time to prepare for it after the announcement in early December of an early vote.
Eight journalists and media executives have been imprisoned in recent weeks, while on Wednesday their colleagues complained about the conditions they were given to cover the voting day.
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