Blaise Compaoré (born 3 February 1951)[4][5] is a Burkinabé-Ivorian former politician who served as the second president of Burkina Faso from 1987 to 2014.

Following the end of the 1974 Agacher Strip border clashes between Upper Volta and Mali, Compaoré was posted north of Ouahigouya.

During the Agacher Strip War with Mali in December 1985, Compaoré commanded Burkinabé soldiers who split into small groups and employed guerrilla tactics against Malian tanks.

He initially ruled in a triumvirate with Henri Zongo and Jean-Baptiste Boukary Lingani: in September 1989 those two were arrested, charged with plotting to overthrow the government, summarily tried and executed.

[20] In October 1987, Compaoré and many others formed a new political party called the Popular Front, centered around communist, as well as Marxist–Leninist ideals.

[24] Compaoré agreed to meet with United Nations supervised bodies to export weapons after allegations that he and his government has been involved in smuggling arms to rebels in Sierra Leone and Angola.

They discussed their concerns that the country had violated the arms embargo against Sierra Leone and Unita rebels and were being accused of it.

[29] Compaoré responded by suspending import taxes on products like food for half a year and by increasing commodity for water and electricity.

[34] In June 2014 Compaoré's ruling party, the Congress for Democracy and Progress (CDP), called on him to organise a referendum that would allow him to alter the constitution in order to seek re-election in 2015.

[35] On 30 October 2014, the National Assembly was scheduled to debate an amendment to the constitution that would have enabled Compaoré to stand for re-election as president in 2015.

Opponents protested against this by storming the parliament building in Ouagadougou, starting fires inside it and looting offices.

[37] Compaoré reacted to the events by shelving the proposed constitutional changes, dissolving the government, declaring a state of emergency and offering to work with the opposition to resolve the crisis.

Later in the day, the military, under General Honore Traore, announced that it would install a transitional government 'in consultation with all parties' and that the National Assembly was dissolved; he foresaw 'a return to the constitutional order' within a year.

[43][44][45][46] A week later, Jeune Afrique published an interview with Compaoré in which he alleged that 'part of the opposition was working with the army' to plot his overthrow and that 'history will tell us if they were right'.

[47] The first head of state that has been in office for more than a short time after Blaise Campaoré is Roch Marc Christian Kaboré as of 29 December 2015.

[51] On 26 July 2006, he was designated as the mediator of the Inter-Togolese Dialogue, which was held in Ouagadougou in August 2006[52] and resulted in an agreement between the government and opposition parties.

[53] He has also acted as mediator in the crisis in Ivory Coast, brokering the peace agreement signed by the Ivorian president, Laurent Gbagbo, and the New Forces leader, Guillaume Soro, in Ouagadougou on 4 March 2007.

[56] The BBC noted in 2014 that he was 'the strongest ally to France and the United States in the region' and that 'despite his own history of backing rebels and fuelling civil wars in the West African neighbourhood ... more importantly, he used his networks to help Western powers battling Islamist militancy in the Sahel'.

In an interview with the magazine Famille Chrétienne, Compaoré asserted that the notion of sexual abstinence was not a monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church and that European non-governmental organizations that disagreed with traditional morality were profiting from the situation to intervene in regional African affairs.

[58] In April 2021, a military court in Burkina Faso indicted Compaoré in absentia, charging him with the 1987 murder of his immediate predecessor, Thomas Sankara.

[59] Another trial against him, on counts of attacking state security, concealing a corpse, and complicity in a murder, began on 11 October 2021.