Abdelaziz Bouteflika resigned as Algeria's president on Tuesday, April 2.
It's an about-face for the 82-year-old, who earlier this year announced his intentions to run for a fifth term. The prospect of Bouteflika running again sparked mass protests in Algeria, ultimately forcing Bouteflika to back down and withdraw his candidacy. The government has since postponed the elections.
Bouteflika was first elected in 1999 with the backing of the military, in a race boycotted by all other candidates and widely panned as fraudulent. However, he won praise as a new president for steering his country back to stability after "the black decade" of the 1990s, when a bloody civil war left more than 150,000 dead.
He was elected again in 2004, 2009 and 2014 by wide margins, although often with criticism about the elections' fairness.