Azerbaijan's President Calls for Early Presidential Elections

Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev has called for early presidential elections to be held on February 7, according to a document published by his office. Aliyev, 61, was re-elected for a seven-year term in 2018. He ordered a surprise attack in September following a nine-month blockade aimed at reclaiming the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which had been under Armenian control, marking his second successful assault in three years. He views this action as a correction of what he and most Azerbaijanis consider a historical mistake of the actual separation of the region due to a bloody ethnic conflict that coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Aliyev has successfully formed a close alliance with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, thanks to Azerbaijan's oil wealth, while maintaining working relations with both Russia and the West, which have sharply differing views regarding Moscow's war with Ukraine.