Dictator
Ilham Aliyev
Succeeded his father as president in 2003 and has since named his wife vice president.
Ilham Aliyev became president of Azerbaijan in 2003, succeeding his father Heydar Aliyev, who had ruled the country for a decade. He has since removed presidential term limits via a 2009 referendum and, in 2017, appointed his wife, Mehriban Aliyeva, as vice president — formalizing a family power structure. His government has jailed journalists, bloggers, and opposition activists, and has been repeatedly implicated in transnational corruption schemes, including the so-called "Azerbaijani Laundromat" investigated by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
Aliyev's 2023 military offensive that retook Nagorno-Karabakh from ethnic Armenian forces, ending a decades-long territorial dispute, significantly boosted his domestic popularity, even as it triggered the mass displacement of over 100,000 ethnic Armenians from the region.