By Nailia Bagirova
BAKU (Reuters) -Azerbaijan’s ruling party was on course for a single-seat majority on Sunday in a snap parliamentary election called by President Ilham Aliyev, according to an exit poll.
The poll, conducted by Oracle Advisory Group, said Aliyev’s New Azerbaijan party was set to win 63 out of 125 seats, down from 69 in the outgoing parliament.
Despite the forecast decline in seats, the president’s supporters were still set to dominate the new legislature.
Dozens of other seats were set to go to candidates who are nominally independent of political parties but in practice back the government, and to minor pro-government parties.
It was the first parliamentary election since Azerbaijan staged a lightning offensive a year ago to recapture the breakaway territory of Karabakh, where ethnic Armenians had enjoyed de facto independence for three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Aliyev, in power since 2003, moved swiftly to capitalise on that victory and won a fifth presidential term in February with more than 92% of the vote, according to election authorities.
Armenia accused Baku of ethnic cleansing in Karabakh after almost all of its more than 100,000 ethnic Armenian residents fled the area.
Azerbaijan denied that charge. It is rebuilding the region and resettling it with Azerbaijanis who fled during a war with Armenia in the 1990s. The Central Election Commission said about 42,000 people in Karabakh were registered to vote on Sunday.
The opposition Musavat party took part in the election for the first time in 15 years, having boycotted previous contests. It was not set to win any seats, according to the exit poll.
Its leader Arif Gadzhili told Reuters he did not believe the vote would be fair, but the party was running in order to “activate the political atmosphere in the country”.
“The elections are not taking part in democratic conditions,” he said.
Opposition deputies in the outgoing parliament are loyal to Aliyev, but some opponents outside parliament say they have faced persecution.
They point to the arrests of a string of independent journalists and political activists, which have focused international attention on Azerbaijan’s human rights record as the oil-producing country prepares to host this year’s COP29 climate summit in Baku in November.
Aliyev has rejected criticism over the arrests, saying Azerbaijan must protect its media landscape from “external negative influences”.
(Reporting by Nailia Bagirova in Baku; Writing by Mark TrevelyanEditing by Gareth Jones)
