Asif Ali Zardari was elected the 14th president of Pakistan, achieving victory in the presidential elections.
Zardari, widower of the first female leader Benazir Bhutto, became head of state of the country for the second time, after having been from 2013 to 2018. Leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), he received 411 votes from Parliament, while his opponent Mehmood Khan Achakzai, a candidate supported by former Prime Minister Imran Khan, had 181 votes.
Zardari was the joint candidate of the current ruling coalition led by Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif.
Born in July 1955 to a prominent landowning family in the southern province of Sindh, Zardari began his active political career in the early 1980s.
In 1987 she married Benazir Bhutto, shortly before her historic election as Pakistan's first female prime minister in 1988. After Benazir Bhutto's assassination in 2007,
Asif Zardari took over the leadership of the PPP.
He currently leads the party together with his son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who serves as co-president.
Zardari's reputation has been attacked by a series of corruption allegations including taking bribes for the purchase of jewellery.
Despite his reputation as "Mr. Ten Percent" - for the alleged fee he took for approving contracts - a sympathy vote propelled him politically when his wife was murdered in a bomb and gun attack in 2007. Between 2008 and 2013, he carried out a constitutional reform that reduced presidential powers and his second term will see him hold a mostly ceremonial position.
He has spent more than 11 years in prison, a long time even by the standards of Pakistani politicians, with a gambler's knack for recovering from scandals.
As a young man he expressed only limited political ambitions, losing the 1983 local elections. It was his 1987 arranged marriage to PPP leader Benazir Bhutto that brought him to political prominence.
Their union - brokered by Bhutto's mother - was considered an unlikely pairing for a leader of one of Pakistan's major political dynasties.
Bhutto graduated from Oxford and Harvard, driven by the desire to oust then president Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, who had forced her father to leave the office of prime minister and had him executed.
Zardari was a university dropout and was known for fights, parties and love affairs.
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