00:00 Azerbaijanis are voting in a snap election that is all but certain to give the incumbent
00:05 president Ilham Aliyev another seven years in office. He's already been in power some 20 years,
00:12 a period during which civil liberties have eroded in Azerbaijan. Now Aliyev's office brought forward
00:18 this election by a year after his troops retook the Karabakh region from ethnic Armenian forces
00:25 at the end of 2023. With more details here's our correspondent Talin Ujian reporting now
00:32 from Yerevan in Armenia. Azerbaijani elections were initially set for next year but the president
00:40 Ilham Aliyev called for an early election right after the successful offensive that his army
00:45 launched in Nagorno-Karabakh last September which led to the exile of more than 100,000 ethnic
00:51 Armenians to Armenia. The region was disputed between the two countries for more than 30 years
00:58 and as Ilham Aliyev said in an interview for Euronews last August, to win the war was the
01:03 mission of his political life. This election comes at a moment where his popularity is at its highest.
01:10 He and his wife who's the current vice president of Azerbaijan went to vote this Wednesday morning
01:15 in the biggest city of Nagorno-Karabakh which is a strong symbol to assert his victory in the region.
01:21 There's very little chance that the president won't win these elections that are boycotted by
01:27 the opposition. Elections that take place in the context of increased repression of activists and
01:33 the press. 13 independent journalists have been detained since last October and an election
01:39 observer from Switzerland sent by the Organization for the Security and Cooperation in Europe has
01:45 been expelled from the country last week. Azerbaijan ranks 151 out of 180 on the reporters
01:52 without borders press freedom index. Here in Armenia these elections are compounded by fears
01:58 of military incursions inside Armenia proper. Azerbaijan still occupies around 150 kilometers
02:05 square of Armenian territory and peace talks are moving very slowly with one of the main issue
02:11 being the border delimitation between the two countries. Ilham Aliyev often refers to some
02:16 regions of Armenia as western Azerbaijan.
