Moncef Marzouki

Moncef Marzouki has been President of Tunisia since December 2011. Trained as a doctor, he was among Ben Ali's staunchest critics and lived in exile for nearly two decades. He campaigned against Ben Ali in the 1994 presidential election and was subsequently imprisoned for four months, after which he left for Paris, returning days after Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia in January 2011. During this time, he founded the political party Congress for the People.

Upon his return to Tunisia, Marzouki announced his intention to run for the presidency. Unlike the moderate Islamist Ennahda party that won the 2011 Tunisian parliamentary elections, Marzouki is a secularist who also affirms Tunisia's traditional Arab-Muslim identity. Selected as a compromise between Islamists and liberals, he still faced opposition from those who oppose the new Tunisian system, which decreases the president's power compared to his predecessors.

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