Ilham Aliyev

Biography

Ilham Aliyev was born in Baku in 1961, the son of Heydar Aliyev, who later became president of Azerbaijan. He entered the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 1977, continued there as a postgraduate and received a doctorate in history in 1985, then lectured at the institute until 1990. After heading a group of private businesses in the early 1990s, he was vice-president and then first vice-president of the state oil company SOCAR from 1994 to 2003. Since 1997 he has also been president of the National Olympic Committee of Azerbaijan.

He rose through the ruling New Azerbaijan Party, becoming deputy chair in 1999 and first deputy chair in 2001, and led Azerbaijan's delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from 2001 to 2003. In August 2003, as his father's health failed, he was appointed prime minister, and in October he was declared the winner of a presidential election widely described as fraudulent. He succeeded his father at the end of that month.

Aliyev was re-elected in 2008, and after a 2009 referendum removed presidential term limits he won again in 2013, 2018 and 2024; in 2017 he made his wife, Mehriban Aliyeva, vice president. Oil and gas revenues have underpinned a government widely described as authoritarian, and investigations such as the Azerbaijani laundromat and the Pandora Papers have tied his family to offshore wealth and to payments to European politicians. Under his leadership Azerbaijan retook Nagorno-Karabakh in the 2020 war and the 2023 offensive.