Chad’s National Electoral Management Agency (ANEM) announced that transitional President Mohamed Idriss Deby Itno won the May 6 presidential elections with 61% of the vote.
Deby far exceeded the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a second round, the agency said, adding that prime minister and main opposition candidate Succès Masra, 40, had won 18.53 percent of the vote.
Born in 1984 in the capital N’Djamena, Mohamed Idriss Deby Itno belongs to the Zaghawa tribe, which represents a small percentage of Chad’s population, and is best known by the nickname “Mohamed Kaka” or “grandmother”, a nickname that refers to his paternal grandmother who raised him.
His father is former President Idriss Deby, who ruled Chad for three decades before being assassinated in April 2021 by rebels.
Mohamed Idriss Deby Itno has been married three times and has five children with his first wife, whom he married in 2010, the daughter of former Central African minister Abbacar Saboun, and his second wife was from the Zaghawa tribe, to which his father belongs.
His third wife, Dahbaya Omar Soni, from Goran and the daughter of an army general, worked as a journalist before being appointed presidential public relations director in 2019.
Deby studied at local schools in Chad, then enrolled in the group of joint military schools, before travelling to France to take a three-month training course at the military high school in the Aix-en-Provence region.
After graduating from the Military Academy with the rank of lieutenant, he was appointed deputy commander of the infantry division of the General Directorate of the State Institutions Security Service, participated in repelling the rebel attack on the capital in April 2006, and participated in military operations against rebel groups in the eastern town of Um Dam in 2009.
He rose through military positions until he was appointed interim president of the country by a council of 15 generals in April 2021 after his father was killed.
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