Azerbaijan's incumbent President and a candidate for ongoing Azeri presidential elections Ilham Aliyev casts his ballot as his family members stand nearby at a polling station in Khankendi city, also known as Stepanakert by Armenia, following an Azeri military operation and a further mass exodus of ethnic Armenians from the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan, February 7, 2024. Official website of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan/Handout via REUTERS
BAKU (Reuters) - Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev was on course for a landslide re-election win, initial results showed on Wednesday, in a vote he called early after recapturing the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia and a crackdown on the media.
According to preliminary results released by the central election commission after just over half of the votes had been counted, Aliyev was way ahead with 92.1% of votes cast.
An earlier exit poll conducted among 63,000 people by Oracle Advisory Group had suggested he would take 93.9% of the vote.
The two main opposition parties are boycotting the poll in the oil and gas producing state. Azeri energy resources are central to European plans to reduce dependency on Russian gas following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.
Aliyev, who succeeded his father Heydar as president in 2003, has typically taken over 85% of the vote in elections that rights groups said were neither free nor fair.
Azerbaijani officials say the elections are fair and transparent, and that Aliyev's popularity has increased since victory in Karabakh.
Baku, a close ally of Turkey which also maintains working relations with Russia, attributes Western criticism to prejudice against its mainly Muslim population.
In January, Aliyev, 62, said he had called the snap poll to mark "the start of a new era" in Azerbaijan, which he said had restored its sovereignty by retaking Karabakh. He faced six nominal rivals, none of them critical of his rule.
A series of independent journalists have been arrested since November in a crackdown on dissent, several of them charged with crimes including smuggling.
International press freedom groups have described the arrests as an attempt to silence anti-corruption reporting.
In December Aliyev moved the election from Oct. 2025, shortly after Azerbaijan retook Karabakh, an Azerbaijani region whose mostly ethnic Armenian population had been de facto independent of Baku since the early 1990s.
As the Soviet Union unravelled, Azerbaijan lost an extended war with Armenia over Karabakh, a humiliating defeat which Aliyev worked to reverse.
For Azerbaijan, restoration of control over Karabakh marks a triumphant end to decades of intermittent war and a chance for hundreds of thousands of internal refugees to return home.
For neighbouring Armenia, the collapse of Karabakh is a tragedy and humanitarian crisis, with almost all of the region's 120,000 ethnic Armenians having since fled to Armenia.
(Reporting by Nailia Bagirova in Baku; writing by Felix Light/Andrew Osborn; editing by Philippa Fletcher, Gareth Jones and David Ljunggren)
