© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev attends a meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council in Moscow, Russia May 25, 2023. Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Pool via REUTERS/File photo
(Reuters) – Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, riding high on a wave of support for his recapture of the breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, on Thursday called an early presidential election for Feb. 7.
Aliyev, 61, was last re-elected in 2018 for a seven-year term, with a declared 86% of the vote, in a poll boycotted by major opposition parties.
With political dissent largely suppressed, he is almost certain to win a new term as head of the oil-rich state on the Caspian Sea courted by Russia, Turkey and the West.
In September he ordered a lightning offensive, after a nine-month blockade, to take full control of Nagorno-Karabakh from the ethnic Armenians who had run it for over three decades.
It was Baku’s second successful assault on ethnic Armenian-controlled territory in three years, and finally overturned what Aliyev and most in Azerbaijan saw as the historical wrong of Karabakh’s de facto secession in a bloody ethnic conflict that accompanied the collapse of the…
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