Azerbaijan held a snap parliamentary election on Sunday, the first since regaining full control of the former breakaway Karabakh region in a swift military operation last year. Polls closed in the evening for the vote to elect members of the 125-seat Milli Mejlis parliament.
The election, originally scheduled for November, was moved up by President Ilham Aliyev to avoid conflicting with the United Nations climate talks (COP29) set to take place in Baku later this year.
Aliyev’s New Azerbaijan party, which currently holds 69 seats in parliament, is expected to maintain its dominance. The remaining seats are largely held by small pro-government parties or independents. Opposition participation is limited, with the Musavat party fielding 25 registered candidates out of 34 proposed, and the Republican Alternative party running 12 candidates.
This election follows a pattern of political continuity in Azerbaijan since its independence from the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Ilham Aliyev has been in power since 2003, succeeding his father Haidar Aliyev, who ruled from 1993. Both administrations have been characterized by suppression of dissent amid growing national wealth from oil and natural gas reserves.
The vote takes place less than a year after Azerbaijan’s military operation to reclaim the Karabakh region, which had been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces since 1994. The offensive resulted in the exodus of most of the region’s 120,000 Armenian residents.
Previous elections in Azerbaijan have not been regarded as fully free or fair by international standards. For this election, the national election commission reported that 50 organizations would conduct observer missions, with the largest contingent from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe set to present its preliminary assessment on Monday.
