H.E. Félix-Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo, President of Democratic Republic of the Congo. H.E. President Felix-Antoine Tshisekedi is also the current Chairperson of the African Union, from Feb 2021 to Feb 2022. Prior to being elected President of the DRC in its first ever peaceful hand over of power, he was a top executive of the UDPS (Union for Social Democracy and Social Progress), a party led by his late father, Etienne Tshisekedi, who passed away in February 2017. In 2011, he was elected as Member of the National Assembly representing the constituency of Kananga in the Kasai Occidental province. Having refused to sit in the National Assembly in protest of the electoral fraud, he was later on deprived of his parliamentary mandate in 2013. Following the death of his father, he was elected national president of the UDPS at an extraordinary party Congress in March 2018.
In the same month, he was chosen by his fellow opposition leaders to lead the “Rassemblement”, on broad opposition electoral platform for the presidential election. He is one of the initiators of the Congolese Dialogue for the respect of the Constitution and for the peaceful transition of power in the DRC. A process he defended tirelessly, and which led him to form an alliance with Vital Kamerhe of the Union for the Congolese Nation (UCN) in a political agreement signed in Nairobi on 23 November 2018, forming the platform” CACH” (Cap for Change) for the December 2018 elections. On 30 December 2018, he was elected President of the Republic for a five-year term. At 56, he became the 5th President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the first ever peaceful transfer of power in the largest country in Central Africa.