In government

In July 1989 Karimli led Yurd into the newly created Popular Front of Azerbaijan (PFA) movement. He headed a party cell at his university and participated in the creation of the movement's charter.

In 1991, after receiving his diploma, he started working as a teacher in the Baku State University Law Department. At the same time, Karimli worked as a correspondent with the independent Azadlıq (Freedom) newspaper.

In January 1992, he was elected the deputy chairman of the PFA Supreme Council. In April 1993, the head of the PFA and the President of Azerbaijan Abulfaz Elchibey (Azerbaijan's first elected President after the breakup of the Soviet Union) appointed Karimli as Secretary of State.

After the coup d'etat in the summer of 1993 which brought Heydar Aliyev to power, Karimli submitted his resignation.

In opposition

In 1995, the PFA was renamed as the Azerbaijan Popular Front Party (APFP), with Elchibey remaining as its chairman. From 1995 till 2000 Karimli was Elchibey's first assistant. In the parliamentary elections of 1995 and 2000, he was also elected as a member of parliament. In 2000, after Elchibey's death, the APFP broke up into "conservative" and "reformist" wings. Karimli became the head of the "reformists", which was mostly made up of former activists of the Yurd.

Since 2003, Karimli has been calling for creation of a bloc of opposition parties. In spring 2005, under Karimli's initiative, the Freedom (Azadıq) bloc of three parties was created, comprising the APFP-reformists, the Equality Party (Müsavat) and the Democratic party.

As another attempt against opposition rights his international passport was confiscated, making Ali Karimli one of the few opposition leaders of the world without a valid international passport.

Karimli is active in organizing protests that have rattled Baku since March 2011, part of a regional wave of unrest. He was interrogated for eight hours by the office of Attorney General Zakir Qaralov on 16 April in connection with the protests.^[1]

In April 2016, after Kerimli criticized the Azerbaijani government over its actions during the 2016 Armenian–Azerbaijani clashes, he became a subject of a series of protests (the latest one held on 12 April in front of Karimli's house), allegedly organized by the authorities. The protesters also demanded to exile him from the country. According to the human rights lawyer Intigam Aliyev, attacks against Karimli are simply diverting attention from truly important issues and testing technologies to distract people's justified anger caused by the serious consequences of wrong decisions.^[2][3]