Azeri Ruling Party Wins Most Seats in Snap Parliamentary Vote
(Bloomberg) -- Azerbaijan’s ruling New Azerbaijan Party won the largest number of seats in the country’s parliament in a snap election on Sunday, according to exit polls conducted in all but three constituencies.
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YAP, as the party is known, won at least 62 out of 125 seats, while non-partisan candidates got 43 seats, US-based pollster Oracle Advisory Group said at a press conference in the capital Baku. The remaining seats went to small pro-government parties.
The Central Electoral Commission, the country’s electoral body, is expected to release preliminary results of the election later on Sunday.
President Ilham Aliyev dissolved parliament in June and announced that elections slated for November would be brought forward so that they don’t coincide with the United Nation’s Conference of the Parties, or COP, that’s scheduled for Nov. 11-22.
Aliyev himself extended his 20-year rule in a landslide victory in an early presidential election in February that observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said lacked genuine competition.
He called the vote after Azerbaijan, in a blitz offensive a year ago, reclaimed control of the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which had been under the control of ethnic Armenians since a war in the early 1990s.
The area’s 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled to neighboring Armenia after the takeover, prompting accusations of ethnic cleansing, which Azerbaijan denied.
Azerbaijan and Armenia have yet to sign a formal peace agreement to end more than three decades of conflict, despite mediation efforts by the US, the European Union and Russia.
Several opposition parties and groups vied for parliamentary seats in Sunday’s ballot, but the main Popular Front Party boycotted, citing a lack of conditions to hold a free and fair vote.
All previous elections held under Aliyev have been described as undemocratic by Vienna-based OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. The group will share its preliminary assessment of the election on Monday.
A crackdown on journalists, opposition and civil society activists in the run-up to the vote have drawn criticism from the US and the EU, which buys oil and natural gas from Azerbaijan. Aliyev signed a memorandum of understanding with the European Commission in 2022 to double natural gas exports to Europe to 20 billion cubic meters per year by 2027.
Relations have become particularly fraught with France after the latter started selling weapons to Armenia. Paris in June accused Azerbaijan of fomenting deadly unrest in New Caledonia, a French territory in the Pacific, which Aliyev denied.
(Updates with exit poll results throughout.)
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