The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, has ordered elections to be held sooner than scheduled.
Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev has referred to as an early presidential election for February 7, 2024.
The president on Thursday ordered officers to carry a “snap election” sooner than deliberate, based on a decree by the presidency. The vote was initially going to be held in 2025.
Aliyev’s reputation in Azerbaijan has lately elevated after the federal government took full management of the Karabakh area following a lightning rout of ethnic Armenian forces. The vote is anticipated to increase the decades-long rule of his household.
Aliyev, 61, was final re-elected in 2018 for a seven-year time period, with a declared 86 % of the vote, in a ballot boycotted by main opposition events.
With political dissent largely suppressed, he’s virtually sure to win a brand new time period.
In September, Aliyev ordered a lightning offensive, after a nine-month blockade, to take full management of Nagorno-Karabakh from the ethnic Armenians who had run it for greater than three many years.
It was Baku’s second profitable assault on ethnic Armenian-controlled territory in three years and at last overturned what Aliyev and most in Azerbaijan noticed because the historic unsuitable of Karabakh’s de facto secession in a bloody ethnic battle that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nearly all the area’s 120,000 or so ethnic Armenians fled.
In keeping with an Azerbaijani-run pollster, about 75 % of the inhabitants agrees with how Aliyev dealt with the battle in Nagorno-Karabakh.
“Aliyev’s approval ratings had always been high, and they skyrocketed after the victorious military operation in Karabakh in September,” impartial political analyst Farhad Mammadov advised the AFP information company. “He is at the peak of his popularity.”
Aliyev has run the nation since 2003 after succeeding his father, the earlier ruler, Heydar Aliyev.
The 2-term restrict for presidents within the nation was eliminated in 2009 and in 2016, the presidential phrases have been prolonged from 5 to seven years and Aliyev appointed his spouse, Mehriban Aliyeva, as the primary vice chairman.
Supporters have praised the Aliyevs for turning a republic as soon as regarded as a Soviet backwater right into a flourishing vitality provider to Europe.
However critics argue they’ve crushed the opposition, stifled media and used their energy to amass a fortune that funds a lavish way of life for the president and his household.
Rights activists have lately decried the arrest of a number of high-profile journalists recognized for investigations into corruption among the many political elite.
The organisation Reporters with out Borders (RSF) ranks Azerbaijan 151st out of 180 international locations in its World Press Freedom Index.
