Azerbaijan's ruling party set to retain parliamentary majority in snap election

BAKU - Azerbaijan's ruling party was set to retain its majority in Sunday's snap parliamentary election, election officials said, in the country's first vote since staging a lightning offensive a year ago to recapture the breakaway territory of Karabakh.

President Ilham Aliyev's party was on course to win 67 out of 125 seats in the parliament, based on 91% of the vote count, Central Election Commission chief Mazahir Panakhov said at a media conference.

That is nearly on par with the 69 seats in the outgoing parliament.

Just over 2 million people in Azerbaijan, a country that's bounded by the Caspian Sea and Caucasus Mountains, voted, bringing the turnout at the time of the close of polling stations to 37.3%, Panakhov said.

According to exit polls, 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 vote since Azerbaijan recaptured 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 allegation. 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.