Key figures: Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Mustafa Barghouti, Yasser Arafat (predecessor), Ariel Sharon (Israeli PM), Jimmy Carter (international observer), Joe Biden (U.S. Senate observer)
Summary
On January 9, 2005, Mahmoud Abbas was elected President of the Palestinian Authority, winning 501,448 votes — 67.38 percent — in a field of seven candidates. His closest challenger, independent physician and activist Mustafa Barghouti, received 156,227 votes (20.99 percent). Turnout was 73.42 percent of the roughly 1.09 million registered voters across the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. The election was the first Palestinian presidential contest since Yasser Arafat’s unopposed re-election in 1996 and was called following Arafat’s death in Paris on November 11, 2004, at age 75. Hamas and Islamic Jihad boycotted the contest, citing what they called a premature political process. Abbas was inaugurated on January 15, 2005, at the Palestinian Authority’s headquarters in Ramallah.
Abbas — known by his kunya Abu Mazen — was born in Safed in 1935 and fled during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, eventually becoming one of the founding members of Fatah in the late 1950s alongside Arafat. A trained lawyer with a doctorate from the Oriental University in Moscow (1982), he was regarded within the PLO as its chief negotiator and served as the lead Palestinian signatory to the 1993 Oslo Accords. He had previously served as the Palestinian Authority’s first prime minister from March to September 2003, a post created under pressure from the United States and the Quartet (the U.S., European Union, Russia, and United Nations) as part of the Roadmap for Peace. His first term ended after less than six months amid public clashes with Arafat over control of security forces.
After Arafat’s death, Abbas was named PLO chairman by the organization’s Executive Committee and was subsequently endorsed as Fatah’s presidential candidate by the movement’s Revolutionary Council on November 25, 2004. The 2005 election was monitored by more than 900 international observers, including a delegation led by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, U.S. Senators Joe Biden and John Sununu, and a European Union mission. The EU characterized the vote as “a very important step towards the creation of a viable and democratic Palestinian state.”
Campaign Platform and Political Context
Abbas campaigned explicitly on ending the Second Intifada, which had claimed roughly 3,000 Palestinian and 1,000 Israeli lives since September 2000, and on resuming direct negotiations with Israel. He called for a negotiated two-state solution and consistently rejected armed operations against Israeli civilians — a stance that distinguished him sharply from more militant factions within Fatah itself. He pledged reform of Palestinian Authority institutions, including consolidation of the fragmented security services that had proliferated under Arafat, and promised to crack down on financial corruption that had long plagued the PA.
His election came weeks after President George W. Bush had named the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a priority for his second term (see George W. Bush’s 2005 agenda) and days before Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice’s confirmation hearings (see Rice as Secretary of State). The incoming Bush administration signaled greater willingness to engage the Palestinian leadership under Abbas than it had under Arafat, and Abbas’s victory was welcomed by Washington as an opening for diplomacy.
Sharm el-Sheikh and the Gaza Disengagement
On February 8, 2005, Abbas met Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at the Sharm el-Sheikh Summit in Egypt — the first formal summit between Palestinian and Israeli leaders since the collapse of Camp David in July 2000. The two leaders declared a mutual cessation of violence, with Abbas pledging to prevent Palestinian attacks on Israelis and Sharon pledging to halt Israeli military operations against Palestinians. Although the ceasefire was fragile and repeatedly tested by rocket fire from Gaza and Israeli targeted killings, it broadly held through the summer.
The summit set the stage for Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip, announced by Sharon and carried out in August–September 2005, during which Israel evacuated all 21 Israeli settlements in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank, withdrawing approximately 9,000 settlers (see Gaza Disengagement). Abbas accepted the handover of Gaza, which the Palestinian Authority formally received on September 12, 2005. The Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt was reopened to Palestinian travelers in November 2005 under a European Union monitoring mission (EU BAM Rafah), a direct product of the diplomacy that Abbas’s election had enabled.
Palestinian Political Divisions
Abbas’s election papered over a deepening rift within Palestinian politics. Hamas, which had boycotted the presidential election, performed strongly in Palestinian municipal elections held in January and May 2005. In January 2006, Hamas would win a parliamentary majority in Palestinian Legislative Council elections — a result that triggered an international funding cutoff to the PA and ultimately led to the violent takeover of Gaza by Hamas in June 2007, splitting Palestinian governance between a Fatah-run West Bank Authority and a Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
Abbas’s authority was thus circumscribed almost from the beginning of his mandate. His four-year presidential term formally expired in January 2009; when no new election was held, Abbas issued a decree extending his own term indefinitely. As of the mid-2020s, no subsequent Palestinian presidential election has taken place, making his January 2005 mandate the foundation of nearly two decades of continuous rule.
Significance
Abbas’s election marked the first internationally recognized, orderly transfer of power in Palestinian Authority history — a legitimizing moment that opened a brief diplomatic window. It came at a pivotal juncture: Israel’s planned unilateral Gaza withdrawal gave Abbas a tangible political achievement to show Palestinians, while U.S. and European engagement provided financial and diplomatic support. The election’s legacy is deeply contested: it produced real diplomatic progress in 2005, including the Sharm el-Sheikh ceasefire and the Gaza handover, but the subsequent Palestinian split undermined his authority and the two-state process neither side had been able to close.