Ilham Aliyev

Ilham Aliyev (born December 24, 1961, Baku, Azerbaijan, U.S.S.R. [now Baku, Azerbaijan]) is the longtime president of Azerbaijan (2003– ) who has leveraged the country’s oil wealth to enrich his autocratic rule and build up a military capacity that in the 2020s allowed Azerbaijan to take control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of southwestern Azerbaijan that had asserted its independence in the 1990s. He is the son of the late Heydar Aliyev, who was president from 1993 to 2003.

In the shadow of his father: from academia to the oil industry

Aliyev, born in Soviet Baku in 1961, was the second of two children of Heydar Aliyev, then a senior official in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, and Zarifa Aliyeva, an ophthalmologist in the public health sector. From 1977 to 1990 he was at Moscow State University of International Relations (MGIMO), first as an undergraduate, then as a doctoral candidate, and finally as a lecturer. On the night of January 19–20, 1990, Soviet troops—responding to an anti-Armenian pogrom that was taking place—killed 131 Azerbaijanis in Baku, and Aliyev’s father publicly demanded that the soldiers involved be punished. Days later Aliyev was fired from MGIMO.

Aliyev struggled to find work in Moscow, and he eventually sought opportunity in Istanbul. He returned to Azerbaijan after his father was catapulted to the presidency in 1993 amid the turmoil over the conflict (1988–94) over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in southwestern Azerbaijan whose predominantly Armenian population was seeking independence. In 1994 Ilham Aliyev was appointed vice president of the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR), a position he held until 2003, when he became prime minister. Aliyev, who built partnerships between SOCAR and the petroleum industry in the West, played a crucial role in developing Azerbaijan’s ties with the United States, Turkey, and several European countries. The agreement that procured the Caspian-Mediterranean oil pipeline, which opened in 2005, was concluded in 2000 with SOCAR’s involvement. Meanwhile, Aliyev also took part in the National Assembly, elected as a member of parliament in 1995 and again in 2000, and from 2001 to 2003 he joined Azerbaijan’s delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

Presidency

From dynast to autocrat

In July 2003 Aliyev’s father fell ill, and in August he secured the appointment of Aliyev as prime minister, allowing Aliyev to lead the country in his absence. In October Aliyev’s father withdrew from the presidential election slated for later that month and handed his candidacy to his son. With the election stacked in his favor, Aliyev won the election with more than three-fourths of the vote. He was inaugurated on October 31.

When Aliyev took charge, the boost in revenue from oil and natural gas was enriching the economy but also entrenching corruption and cronyism. The country was stable after a tumultuous decade in the 1990s, its economy was modernizing, and its military was growing increasingly capable—even as the self-declared Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh asserted its independence in 2006 with the promulgation of a constitution.

But repression was rampant and political participation was restricted in Azerbaijan under Aliyev. After he was elected to a second term in 2008—amid a boycott by the opposition—he ensured that it would not be his last. A referendum held in early 2009 amended the constitution to abolish presidential term limits and add new restrictions on the media. In 2013, after months of crackdowns on journalists and dissidents, he won reelection with ease. Additional changes to the constitution, in 2016, extended presidential terms to seven years from five and allowed him to appoint his wife, Mehriban, as vice president in 2017. He won a fourth term in 2018.

He gained a reputation for “caviar diplomacy”—using his wealth and business connections to bribe foreign journalists, investors, and politicians.

While concerns grew over human rights violations under Aliyev, he was also making efforts to attract tourism and deepen relations with Western countries. He gained a reputation for “caviar diplomacy”—using his wealth and business connections to bribe foreign journalists, investors, and politicians. In 2008 Azerbaijan began participating in the annual Eurovision Song Contest. It won the competition in 2011 and was awarded the right to host the event in 2012, although the contest drew controversy that year for taking place in a country with a deteriorating human rights record. In 2015 Azerbaijan hosted the European Games, leading activists to coin the term sportswashing to describe Azerbaijan’s attempt to burnish its image by hosting international competitions. But controversy did not deter international events from taking place in Azerbaijan: in 2016 the country began hosting Formula One’s annual European Grand Prix, which was renamed the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in 2017.

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Conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh

In March 2020, as COVID-19 was spreading rapidly throughout the globe, Aliyev’s government undertook emergency measures to prevent the transmission of the novel coronavirus. Those restrictions, which took aim at social gatherings and the spread of false information, were applied particularly harshly against critics of the government. Meanwhile, diplomatic efforts between Azerbaijan and Armenia to resolve decades of tension over Nagorno-Karabakh broke down, and clashes in the region took place in July. Although those clashes were short-lived, tensions continued to simmer as Russia conducted provocative military drills near the Caucasus and Turkey began holding joint military exercises with Azerbaijan. They came to a boil in late September when fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, fueled in part by Turkey’s support of Azerbaijan, reached its most intense and destructive levels since the cease-fire that was brokered in 1994. In addition to a brutal ground war between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces, Azerbaijan employed advanced aerial weaponry supplied by Turkey and Israel as well as drones whose footage helped fuel an extensive information war on social media.

Armenian forces were devastated by the war. On November 9, the day after Azerbaijan captured the region’s second largest city, Şuşa (Shusha), Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan agreed to a cease-fire deal that included the withdrawal of Armenian armed forces from the region. While Russian peacekeepers were to act as guards over much of Nagorno-Karabakh as part of the deal, Azerbaijan was given full control over the areas it had captured during the conflict as well as the districts of Ağdam, Kälbäjär, and Laçin (Lachin). The deal also guaranteed that the city of Xankändi (Stepanakert), Azerbaijan, would retain access to Armenia through the Lachin Corridor mountain pass.

Russia’s peacekeeping role was mitigated, however, by the demands of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Despite the cease-fire agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Lachin Corridor mountain pass was blockaded by Azerbaijani forces in December 2022, and Russia did little to intervene. A renewed offensive by Azerbaijan in September 2023 further solidified Azerbaijan’s control over Nagorno-Karabakh. By October more than 100,000 of about 120,000 ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh had fled the region.

The outcome was a boon for Aliyev’s popularity at home. For Azerbaijanis, the conflict not only reversed the result of the conflict of the early 1990s, which had resulted in a massive refugee crisis, but also showcased the prowess of Azerbaijan’s military might. Taking advantage of the moment, he called for the 2024 presidential election to be held in February, some 20 months before the election was originally due.

Personal life

Aliyev married Mehriban Pashayeva, a physician from a family of prominent academics, in 1983. She became one of the foremost policy makers in Azerbaijan after joining the National Assembly in 2005, and in 2017 Aliyev appointed her to the newly created post of vice president. They have two daughters, Leyla and Arzu, and a son, Heydar, who have all been the subject of international scrutiny for their mysterious offshore holdings from young ages.