Ilham Aliyev wins a landslide victory in Azerbaijan’s presidential election, receiving over 90% of the vote. Despite the expected result, observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have raised concerns about the election’s validity. They stated that the election was not competitive and took place in a restrictive environment, with recent arrests of critical journalists hindering media freedom.
With more than 93% of the ballots counted, Aliyev secured more than 92% of the votes, according to the head of the Central Election Commission. The OSCE observers noted issues such as lack of safeguards against multiple voting and indications of ballot stuffing, raising serious questions about the honesty of the ballot counting process.
Aliyev, who has been in power for over 20 years, is now set to begin another seven-year term as president. However, his time in power has been marked by increasingly strict laws limiting political debate and the arrests of opposition figures and independent journalists.
He will be in the limelight in November when Azerbaijan hosts a United Nations climate change conference. Notably, the president called for an early election just months after his forces reclaimed the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh enclave from ethnic Armenian separatists. Despite criticism of the election process, leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have offered their congratulations to Aliyev.