Azerbaijani president calls snap election for February
- 7 December, 04:57
Azerbaijan will hold a surprise snap presidential election in February 2024. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a relevant decree on December 7, without providing any reasons for holding early presidential elections.
Aliyev’s current, fourth, term is set to expire in early 2025. He has been in power since October 2003. A public referendum in 2009 removed a limit on the number of terms that a president could serve, ensuring his re-election by a huge margin. Another referendum held in 2016 extended the presidential terms to seven years.
It’s noteworthy that the year 2025 will also see the holding of parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan and the expiration of Russian peacekeepers' presence in Karabakh.
Ali Karimli, the leader of the major opposition Popular Front Party, noted the timing of the decree amid Azerbaijan’s worsening ties with the West and the ongoing crackdown on independent media in the country.
“Now it becomes clear why illegal arrests have occupied the country’s agenda in recent months and why the country’s relations with international organisations such as the USA, EU, and OSCE have been artificially strained in recent months’, Karimli wrote in his Facebook page. He stressed that Aliyev sought to hold the presidential election "in isolation from the democratic world".
Meanwhile, Igbal Agazade from Umid party said it would be hard to compete with Aliyev in the presidential election due to Azerbaijan’s return of Karabakh breakaway region in the war with Armenia back in 2020.
Aliyev’s victory in the snap election is indeed impossible not to imagine due to Azerbaijan’s victory in the Nagorno-Karabak war and following the lightning victory over Armenian separatist forces in the region in September that force hundreds of Armenian civilians in Nagorno-Karabakh flee from their homes.
