President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan congratulated Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev for claiming victory in the snap parliamentary elections in the country.
Aliyev’s ruling New Azerbaijan Party won 68 out of 125 seats in the legislature, according to preliminary results.
Erdoğan told Aliyev that the election results proved the Azerbaijani people’s trust and confidence in Aliyev and his party’s performance, as he welcomed the peaceful and democratic atmosphere in which the elections were conducted.
He also highlighted the importance of holding elections in areas liberated from Armenian occupation, for the first time after 30 years.
Aliyev, who has been Azerbaijan's president since 2003, was reelected for a fifth term in office on Feb. 7 with over 92% of the vote. The leaders of the two countries traditionally pay their first visits to each other after elections and both Erdoğan and Aliyev maintained the tradition in June and February, respectively.
Türkiye and Azerbaijan have maintained unshaken ties since the latter declared independence from the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The two countries, which share a common ethnic identity, enhanced their relations under the motto of “one nation, two states.”
Turkish support was significant for Azerbaijan in the Second Karabakh War in 2020 when Baku liberated the border territory from three decades of illegal Armenian occupation in 44 days of clashes that ended with a Russian-brokered peace agreement and opened the door to normalization with its archrival Armenia.
The Shusha Declaration, signed in 2021 by Erdoğan and Aliyev, upgraded the relationship to the level of “alliance.” The declaration focuses on defense cooperation and establishing new transportation routes, affirming joint efforts by the two armies in the face of foreign threats and the restructuring and modernization of their armed forces.
