João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço (born 5 March 1954) is the President of Angola, in office since 26 September 2017, and the leader of the ruling MPLA since 2018. A career military officer who rose to the rank of general, he served for years inside the MPLA’s senior political machinery—most notably as Secretary-General (1998–2003)—before returning to frontline executive power as Minister of National Defence (2014–2017) and then succeeding José Eduardo dos Santos as head of state. Lourenço entered office promising a break with Angola’s entrenched patronage politics, launching a high-profile anti-corruption and state-reform agenda that quickly targeted elements associated with the dos Santos era. His first term also emphasized privatisation and economic diversification in an economy long dominated by oil revenues. In 2022, he won a second term after Angola’s closest election in decades; the opposition UNITA rejected the results and sought to annul them, but the Constitutional Court dismissed the challenge, leaving Lourenço to continue his reform agenda under a cloud of contested legitimacy in parts of the electorate.