Former Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, the candidate of the ruling Fatah faction, won the January 2005 poll to replace the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas
Mr Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, had already succeeded Yasser Arafat as leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), having been Mr Arafat's deputy since 1969.
Many analysts regard Mahmoud Abbas as a moderate. He has condemned the armed Palestinian uprising and favours the resumption of negotiations with Israel. But he faces the key challenge of persuading armed groups to stop their campaign of anti-Israeli attacks.
Mahmoud Abbas was born in 1935 in Safed, a town in present-day northern Israel. He co-founded Fatah - the main political grouping within the PLO - with Yasser Arafat in the late 1950s.
Mr Abbas established contacts with left-wing Israelis in the 1970s, and was the main Palestinian architect of the 1993 Oslo accords, which led to the foundation of the Palestinian Authority.
His brief stint as premier was plagued by power struggles with Mr Arafat over the control of the Palestinian security apparatus and over planned reforms. Mr Abbas resigned in September 2003.
The former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died in a French hospital on 11 November 2004, aged 75.

On 1 July 1994, after 27 years in exile, Arafat returned to Gaza to take up the post of president of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to which he had been elected by the PLO Central Committee in October 1993 and confirmed by a plebiscite in 1996.
But in April 2002 he faced one of his biggest challenges. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared him "irrelevant" and Israeli troops, who had been surrounding his headquarters in Ramallah for four months, battered and occupied most of his compound. However, he survived thanks to international pressure on Sharon to end his siege.
For many, Arafat has come to embody the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.
His critics among the Palestinians, however, accuse him of running an over-personalised, corruption-ridden administration, of making too many concessions to Israel and of putting undue trust in the US which, in their view, had utterly failed to apply the necessary pressure on Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territories.
In March 2003 the Palestinian parliament approved the creation of the post of prime minister. The move had been demanded by the US as a condition to begin work on an internationally-backed peace plan for the region. Deputy PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas was appointed to the post.