^{President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev at the Shusha Global Media Forum. Image: president.az}

Being more travel writer than political journalist, it’s not that often that I’ve had the chance to meet or share a conversation with a national President. I did get a brief chat with ex-President Gerald Ford at Vanderbilt University in Nashville around 1986, and at the same event, I was too busy snaffling chocolate-coated strawberries to shake hands with Jimmy Carter with whom Ford had earlier been debating.  

^{Former U.S. presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford co-hosted the All-Democracies Conferance in 1983. Image: Wikimedia Commons}

In 1993 I sat down to lunch with President Kuniwo Nakamura of Palau, but then the foreign ministry of that island nation was little more than a beach shack, and despite the honour, I got the impression that Mr. Nakamura received fairly few foreign guests.

^{On the left, former President of Palau Kuniwo Nakamura signing a Memorandum. Image: palauembassy.or.jp}

Then last week in Azerbaijan, I attended the Shusha Global Media Forum, a high-level conference for the world’s press to meet and discuss issues related to the changing landscape of journalism as the era of artificial intelligence dawns. Much to my surprise, and that of the other 250 or so local and international communications folks present, the opening ceremony was replaced at the last minute with a chance to have a Q&A session with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev. While those wishing to offer a question were asked to put their names on a list a few minutes in advance, the format appeared to be entirely free-form and unscripted and a very rare opportunity to get a sense of Mr. Aliyev’s personality away from the soundbites and orchestrated official statements through which one is usually likely to hear a politician’s words.

^{President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev at the Shusha Global Media Forum. Image: president.az}

The president responded to a very wide range of questions for over 2½ hours, apparently effortlessly switching between English, Azerbaijani, and Russian. Perhaps most striking was the apparent candour of his answers, the chuckle in his voice when fielding lighter-hearted subjects, and the deft surefootedness of some longer answers in which he appeared to start off at a tangent to the question but proved to be building a carefully textured background before returning to the specifics required. 

^{President Aliyev at the Q&A. Image: president.az}

A couple of international correspondents remarked to me how impressive they found his facility with facts and figures on subjects from gas pipeline capacities to population return movements. And in general, his tone seemed eminently practical and geopolitically realist, for example—in the context of the non-aligned nations particularly—underlining that Azerbaijan bore no grudges against countries who might previously have sided with Armenia. Instead, he insisted, “we tend to play on the field of competitors” with a very consistent approach such that it becomes clear that it is in most countries’ economic interest to realign towards Baku. Occasionally the president seemed to express a sense of what might be interpreted as overconfidence—for example, asserting that Azerbaijan had essentially no “internal threats” or saying that he is proud to go everywhere by car when possible, such that he can see what’s happening on the ground. The latter rang a little hollow, given that the presidential motorcade tends to move at very high speed, with private traffic moved well aside to let it pass. Nonetheless, Aliyev was sanguine about the tendency for people in his position to be inevitably removed from the grapevine of everyday talk and, tellingly, revealed that he garners useful insights on the public mood through his grandchildren’s interaction with social media.

At the end of the session, to the visible horror of several bull-necked security men, President Aliyev readily agreed to a whole series of handshakes and selfies—I photo-bombed a few. Again the impression I gained was of a human side that was refreshing to observe and that’s rarely revealed in the press, other than—in a limited fashion—through some of his wife’s online video posts.

^{Me photo-bombing a selfie with the president. Image: Mark Elliot} 

I didn’t get a chance to speak in person to Mr. Aliyev. However, the lasting impression was one of a level of approachable affability that the Western media has rarely portrayed. Perhaps President Aliyev’s recent choice of appearing at high-level meetings without the formality of a tie is part of a decision to allow this softer image to filter through.