TORONTO – A top Egyptian judge was sworn in Thursday morning as the country’s interim president.
Adly Mansour takes over from Mohammed Morsi, who was ousted Wednesday by the military after one year as Egypt’s first democratically elected president.
In the past few days, millions of Egyptians demanded the resignation of Morsi, who is under house arrest at an undisclosed location.
Mansour will serve until a new president is chosen in an election.
READ MORE: Egypt’s interim president Adly Mansour praises protests, army
Born in Cairo in 1945, according to Al-Jazeera, 67-year-old Mansour is a father-of-three and one of Egypt’s longest serving judges. In 1992, he was appointed vice president of the Supreme Constitutional Court by the now ousted Egypt president Hosni Mubarak. Since then, has served in the state-sponsored religious courts as well as the criminal and civil courts.
VIDEO: Egypt has a new interim leader (July 4)
In less than one week, Mansour has gone from deputy chief of the Supreme Constitutional Court to chief justice to the interim president of Egypt. He was appointed by Morsi himself to the country’s top judicial post and served in that role for two days before becoming the interim leader of the nation.
The Week said Mansour studied in Paris and graduated in law from Cairo University in 1967. According to analysts, it is Mansour’s “low-key demeanour” that might be the reason why the military picked him.
“He represents what the military needs, a fairly low-profile but respected technorat,” said David Hartwell, a Middle East and North Africa analyst at Jane’s Islamic Affairs in an interview with CNN.
In a blog post for Foreign Policy, Tarek Masoud, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard University, said that Mansour does not hold “ultimate authority” and is “not the president of Egypt in the same way that Morsi or Mubarak were presidents of Egypt.”
Experts say that Mansour will still have “considerable control” over the drafting of a new election law and that his main job will be to get an electoral law done. Mansour also aided in drafting the election laws that brought Morsi to power in 2012.
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