Prime Minister and President
On 8 August 1999, Janet Jagan announced that she was resigning as President for health reasons, and that Jagdeo would be her successor. Because the Prime Minister is the President's legal successor, Jagdeo took office as Prime Minister on 9 August, so that he would be positioned to succeed Jagan. He was then sworn in as President on 11 August. – at age 35, he was one of the youngest Heads of State in the world.
Jagdeo was re-elected for another five-year term on 28 August 2006, with the PPP garnering 54.6 percent of the votes. It expanded its majority, by two, to 36 seats in the 65-member parliament. He was sworn in for another term on 2 September.
At the PPP's 29th Congress, Jagdeo received the highest number of votes (777) in the election to the party's Central Committee, held on 2 August 2008. He was then elected to the PPP Executive Committee on 12 August 2008.
In late 2011, he stepped down. His successor, Donald Ramotar, was sworn in on 3 December 2011.
Read more about this topic: Bharrat Jagdeo
Famous quotes containing the words prime minister, prime, minister and/or president:
“One wants in a Prime Minister a good many things, but not very great things. He should be clever but need not be a genius; he should be conscientious but by no means strait-laced; he should be cautious but never timid, bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all, a thick skin.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“In time, after a dozen years of centering their lives around the games boys play with one another, the boys’ bodies change and that changes everything else. But the memories are not erased of that safest time in the lives of men, when their prime concern was playing games with guys who just wanted to be their friendly competitors. Life never again gets so simple.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the fraught bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“... a friend told me that she had read of a woman who had knitted a wash rag for President Wilson. She was eighty years old and her friends thought it remarkable that she could knit a wash rag! I thought that if a woman of eighty could knit a wash rage for a Democratic President it behooved one of ninety-six to make something more than a wash rag for a Republican President.”
—Maria D. Brown (1827–1927)