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Roundup: Parliamentary elections underway amid doubts in Azerbaijan

Xinhua, November 1, 2015 Adjust font size:

Azerbaijan kicks off its 5th parliamentary elections early Sunday to pick the 125 deputies for Azerbaijan's National Assembly, or the parliament.

A total of 5,415 permanent and 132 temporary polling stations in the 125 constituencies across the country were opened at 8:00 a.m. (0400 GMT) and will be closed by 7:00 p.m. (1500 GMT).

According to the Azerbaijani Central Election Commission, around 5.2 million eligible Azerbaijani citizens will go to polling stations to elect their representatives to the parliament. The voter turnout is 28.2 percent (around 1.4 million voters) across the country as of 12.00 p.m.

Polling stations are scheduled to close at 7:00 p.m., while provisional result will be announced around midnight on Sunday.

A total of 767 candidates will compete for the 125 seats in the parliament (Milli Majlis) for a five-year term. A total of 22 political parties are participating in the elections. The minimum number of candidates per constituency is three, and the maximum is 12.

The mainstream opposition in Azerbaijan, a mainly Muslim country of about 9 million people, is boycotting the poll.

Saying that restrictions imposed on it by the authorities would make credible poll monitoring impossible, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said in September that it would not monitor the election, the first time since Azerbaijan won independence after the 1991 disintegration of the former Soviet Union.

The Azerbaijani authorities have dismissed such criticism as unfounded.

More than 66,000 local observers and 500 international observers will monitor the elections.

Parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan are held once every five years on the first Sunday of November. Every citizen above the age of 25 may be elected to parliament in an established order.

The last parliamentary elections were held in Azerbaijan on Nov. 7, 2010, which was observed by monitors from the European Parliament, the OSCE and the Council of Europe. Endi