Laurent Gbagbo Profile: From democracy activist to traditional African 'Big Man'
Back when he was an obscure trade-union leader in the 1970s, Laurent Koudou Gbagbo preached democracy and railed against Ivory Coast's autocratic then-president Felix Houphouet-Boigny.
Today, the Sorbonne-educated former history professor appears to have deserted all the principles which originally led him to form an underground opposition party which demanded multiparty democracy.
All international observers and even the African Union itself has declared that he lost the November 28 elections, which Mr Gbagbo had already delayed six times since 2005.
Yet the winner, Alassane Ouattara, remains trapped in a luxury hotel, guarded by armed UN troops, unable to leave for fear of arrest by his rival.
Mr Gbagbo, born to a Catholic family living in the centre of Ivory Coast, has said that he won and refuses to step down.
It had been hoped that the elections would cement together a nation that had literally been split in two by a vicious north-south civil war which followed Mr Gbagbo's whipping up Christian-Muslim divisions.
He had once been seen as a new model of African leader, removed from the Big Man culture of the continent's presidents which dominated at the time.
When he came to power in 2000, said that shops and businesses no longer had to hang pictures of the president on their walls and state media need not mention him in all news broadcasts.
But his liberal outlook hardened into a strongly nationalist stance as his time in power grew, eventually leading to the civil war which destroyed Ivory Coast's decades-old reputation as a beacon of stability in a volatile region.
Now it appears that the man who was once praised for his courageous fight for multiparty democracy has, in the end, become exactly the kind of leader he once parodied.
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