Beji Caid Essebsi

Mohamed Beji Caid Essebsi (29 November 1926 – 25 July 2019) was a Tunisian lawyer and politician who served as president of Tunisia from 31 December 2014 until his death in office in 2019, the first freely elected president of the republic. Before that he had been prime minister in 2011, in the months after the revolution. ^{1 2}

He was born in 1926 in Sidi Bou Said to an elite family originally from Sardinia; the English article recounts that his great-grandfather Ismail, a Sardinian, was kidnapped by Barbary corsairs at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was raised with the ruling family after converting to Islam, and became an important member of the government. Essebsi joined the Neo Destour youth organisation in Hammam-Lif in 1941, went to France in 1950 to study law in Paris, and began his career as a lawyer defending Neo-Destour activists. ¹

Under Bourguiba and Ben Ali he held senior office across five decades, among it minister of foreign affairs from 1981 to 1986 and speaker of the Chamber of Deputies from 1990 to 1991. After the 2011 revolution he became prime minister on 28 February 2011 under the acting president Fouad Mebazaa, and left that office on 24 December 2011, when the new interim president Moncef Marzouki appointed Hamadi Jebali. He then founded the secular Nidaa Tounes party, which won a plurality of seats in the October 2014 parliamentary election. ¹

He won the 2014 presidential election and succeeded Moncef Marzouki directly, taking office on 31 December 2014; the press of the time, quoted in the English article, called him the Tunisian secular leader. During his presidency he proposed equal inheritance rights for women and men, a proposal the Arabic article records as having met wide opposition on the ground that it conflicted with Islamic law — a matter of state policy, reported here as the sources state it. No article names a school or personal affiliation for Essebsi himself: the Arabic infobox gives Islam in general, and Wikidata carries both Islam and Sunni Islam values, which no text corroborates. ^{1 2 3}

On 27 June 2019 he was hospitalised at a military hospital in Tunis with a serious illness, and he died there on 25 July 2019 at the age of 92, still in office. Mohamed Ennaceur, the speaker of parliament, succeeded him as acting president. He was buried in the Jellaz Cemetery in Tunis. ¹

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