While weeks of preparation went into the inauguration of President George W. Bush, the swearing in of Ms Gloria Macapagal Arroyo as President of the Philippines was a rushed affair, writes Miriam Donohue.
On Saturday morning tens of thousands of Filipinos marched arm in arm towards the Presidential Palace to demand that the former president, Mr Joseph Estrada, step down as leader. As Ms Arroyo was sworn in a hurried open-air ceremony, Mr Estrada and his family were preparing to leave the palace in Manila for the last time.
Born to a former president of the Philippines, Diosdado Macapagal, on April 5th, 1947, Gloria Arroyo was a bright student. For two years she was on the dean's list at Georgetown University, where she had Mr Bill Clinton as a classmate. During her sophomore year at the American university, she went back to the Philippines to marry Mr Jose Miguel Arroyo, a businessman.
In Manila, she pursued a degree in commerce at Assumption College. She earned a master's degree in commerce at the Ateneo de Manila University and went on to complete a PhD in economics at the University of the Philippines.
After completing her studies, she taught economics and worked as a columnist for the now-defunct Manila Chronicle. The former president, Ms Corazon Aquino, assigned her as an assistant secretary in the Department of Trade and Industry.
In 1992 she ran for public office and was elected to the 24 seat Philippine Senate. In 1995 she sought re-election and won more than 16 million votes. She was elected vice-president in the 1998 elections, when Mr Estrada won the Presidency. He made her secretary of the Department of Social Welfare and Development.
She remained a part of the Estrada administration until October of last year, when he was implicated in an underground gambling syndicate. A week after the allegations emerged, Ms Arroyo resigned as social welfare secretary but retained her post as vice-president. She worked to build opposition to Mr Estrada, travelling throughout the Philippines in November to drum up support.
When the Estrada impeachment trial collapsed last week, mass protests broke out in Manila, and Ms Arroyo took her supporters to the streets.
As a senator, she was one of the main authors of legislation that allowed the Philippines to join the World Trade Organisation and is convinced of the need to make it easier for foreign companies to invest.
She has said her plan is to encourage transparency and an end of business cronyism, while getting Manila's growing budget deficit under control.
Ms Arroyo has said she wants a new, cleaner kind of politics to emerge in a country traditionally dominated by provincial overlords and a handful of business clans. The result, she hoped, would be a fairer, more accountable society and a more stable economy. "If we don't start now, we'll never achieve it," she said.