Egypt’s new leader

Egypt’s new caretaker president, Adly Mansour had been head of the Supreme Constitutional Court for just two days when the army named him leader of the Arab world’s most populous state according to Al Arabiya news.

He takes the helm of a nation divided by opinion since the  army ousted its first freely elected president Mohammed Mursi following days of deadly clashes between his Islamist supporters and their increasingly numerous opponents.

Ironically he was named by Mursi himself to Egypt’s top judicial post, which, following the army’s suspension of the constitution, catapulted him into political power.

The 67-year-old father of three, who won a scholarship to France’s most prestigious institute of higher education, the Ecole Nationale de l’Administration, was a long-serving judge under the regime of veteran strongman Hosni Mubarak.

But he served in the state-sponsored religious courts which deliver fatwas, or edicts, on observance, as well as in the civil and criminal courts.

Mansour helped draft the supervision law for the presidential elections that brought Mursi to power in 2012, which included setting a legal timeframe for electoral campaigning.

He was deputy head of the Supreme Constitutional Court from 1992.

Unlike the principal leaders of the opposition – among them Nobel peace laureate Mohamed El Baradei and former Arab League chief Amr Mussa – Mansour was never a household name, but that probably served the military’s purposes in their search for a neutral figurehead for a potentially rollercoaster transition.