Azerbaijan's ruling party retains parliamentary majority after snap vote

By Nailia Bagirova

BAKU (Reuters) -Azerbaijan's ruling party retained its majority in Sunday's snap parliamentary election, preliminary results showed, in the country's first vote since staging a lightning offensive a year ago to recapture the breakaway territory of Karabakh.

The Organisation for Security and Coooperation in Europe (OSCE), a rights watchdog, criticised the vote, saying it had fallen well short of democratic standards.

President Ilham Aliyev's party was on course to win 68 out of 125 seats in parliament, according to preliminary results from the Central Election Commission reported by the TASS news agency. It had 69 seats in the outgoing parliament.

Just over 2 million people in the energy-rich nation cast their ballots, bringing the turnout at the time of the close of polling stations to 37.3%, said Central Election Commission chief Mazahir Panakhov.

Exit polls suggested dozens of other seats would go to candidates who are nominally independent of political parties but in practice back the government as well as to minor pro-government parties.

OSCE election monitors said the election campaign had been "barely visible".

"The September 1 early parliamentary elections took place in a restrictive political and legal environment that does not enable genuine pluralism and resulted in a contest devoid of competition," the OSCE mission said in a statement.

KARABAKH

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 Azerbaijan 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.

(Reporting by Nailia Bagirova in Baku; Writing by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Sonali Paul, Ros Russell and Gareth Jones)