page_title: Ashraf Ghani
section_title: Presidency
hierarchical_section_title: Ashraf Ghani / Presidency
caption_attribution_description: English: Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani meeting with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in Saadabad Palace
context_page_description: Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai is an Afghan politician who is serving as the President of Afghanistan. He was first elected on 20 September 2014 and was re-elected in the 28 September 2019 presidential election. He was announced the winner after a protracted process in February 2020 and was sworn in for a second term on 9 March 2020. An anthropologist by education, he previously served as Minister of Finance and the Chancellor of Kabul University.
  Before returning to Afghanistan in 2002, Ghani was a professor of anthropology at numerous institutions, and later started working with the World Bank. As the Finance Minister of Afghanistan between July 2002 and December 2004, he led Afghanistan's attempted economic recovery after the collapse of the Taliban government.
  He is the co-founder of the Institute for State Effectiveness, an organization set up in 2005 to improve the ability of states to serve their citizens. In 2005 he gave a TED talk, in which he discussed how to rebuild a broken state such as Afghanistan. He is a member of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, an independent initiative hosted by the United Nations Development Programme.
context_section_description: After announcing his candidacy for the 2014 elections, Ghani tapped General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a prominent Uzbek politician and former military official in Karzai's government and Sarwar Danish, an ethnic Hazara, who also served as the Justice Minister in Karzai's cabinet, as his vice presidential candidates. 
   
  After none of the candidates managed to win more than 50% of the vote in the first round of the election, Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, the two front runners from the first round, contested in a run-off election, which was held on 14 June 2014.
  Initial results from the run-off elections showed Ghani as the overwhelming favourite to win the elections. However, allegations of electoral fraud resulted in a stalemate, threats of violence and the formation of a parallel government by the camp of his opponent, Abdullah Abdullah. On 7 August 2014 US Secretary of State John Kerry flew to Kabul to broker a deal that outlined an extensive audit of nearly 8 million votes and formation of a national unity government with a new role for a chief executive officer who would carry out meaningful functions within the president's administration. After a three-month audit process, which was supervised by the United Nations with financial support from the U.S. government, the Independent Election Commission announced Ghani as President after Ghani agreed to a national unity deal. Initially, the election commission said it would not formally announce specific results. It later released a statement that said Ghani managed to secure 55.4% and Abdullah Abdullah secured 43.5% of the vote, although it declined to release the individual vote results. In September 2019,  an explosion near an election rally attended by President Ashraf Ghani killed 24 people and injured 31 others, but Ghani was unhurt.
caption: Ghani meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Saadabad Palace
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