Azerbaijan Holds Parliamentary Elections

Parliamentary elections are held in Azerbaijan today.

The struggle is for 125 seats in the local unicameral parliament - Milli Majlis. There are 767 candidates.

286 of them are nominated by 15 political parties and one bloc of parties Freedom – 2015. 481 are self-nominees or nominees from initiative groups of voters. The right to vote in 5,547 polling stations belongs to more than 5.2 million voters.

According to the CEC, by 10.00, 12.8 percent of the voters took part in the ballot.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, together with members of his family, voted at the site of School N6 in the Sabail district of Baku.

As usual, the head of state did not make any statement for the media after the vote.

The opposition National Council of Democratic Forces refused to participate in the election campaign, expressing this way a protest against the lack of conditions for free and fair elections. A few days before the vote, for the same reasons, the party Musavat and the movement NIDA withdrew from the elections.

In the vast majority of constituencies the elections are actually politically uncontested.

Only in a few counties real alternative to pro-government candidates could be achieved by the movement REAL, the bloc Freedom 2015 and the party Umid (Hope).  -06D-