Michel Martelly took the oath of office Saturday as Haiti's new president, assuming the leadership of an impoverished country still in ruins from one of the most destructive earthquakes of modern times.
A power outtage plunged the ceremony into darkness moments before the bald, onetime carnival singer was sworn in inside a building specially constructed as the temporary home of the country's parliament.
"I swear before God and the nation to faithfully obey the constitution and the laws of the republic," said Martelly, lit up by the flash of news cameras.
Outgoing president Rene Preval then removed the blue and red presidential sash, which was passed to Martelly by the president of the National Assembly in the first democratic transfer of power from one president to a political opponent in the country's turbulent history.
About 500 foreign dignitaries and Haitian members of parliament witnessed the handover in sweltering heat.
After the swearing in, Martelly and his wife Sofia drove to the ruins of the presidential palace in the center of Port-au-Prince where some 2,500 people gathered for a solemn inaugural ceremony amid hymns and religious invocations.
Thousands of cheering supporters massed outside the palace ground's wrought iron fence.
Martelly, 50, a political novice who gained fame as a raucous performer known as "Sweet Micky", faces a mammoth task of rebuilding Haiti, which was devastated by a powerful earthquake in January 2010 that killed more than 225,000 people and leveled much of the capital.
Sixteen months on, the pace of reconstruction is painfully slow for hundreds of thousands of traumatized survivors who lost everything and are forced to subsist in squalid tent cities around the still-ruined capital.
Endemic poverty and chronic political instability also will pose huge challenges for the new president, who was elected March 20 on the strength of his enormous popular appeal and promises of generational change.
Haiti was already the poorest country in the Americas when the 7.0 earthquake left one in seven homeless and its economy prostrate. Half of its 10 million people live off less than two dollars a day.
But Martelly's inauguration fills a leadership vacuum at the top and was expected to encourage foreign governments to release aid that has been sidelined by a fractious election process marred by fraud and outbreaks of violence.
One important guest was former US president Bill Clinton, the UN envoy who co-chairs the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission -- set up after the earthquake to hold the purse strings of some $10 billion in pledged aid.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe and a dozen heads of state attended the ceremony, including President Leonel Fernandez of the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.
Conspicuously absent were ex-dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the shantytown priest who usurped him and became the country's first democratically elected president. Officials said they were not invited to the ceremony.
Their return from exile earlier this year reopened old wounds, and brought a new level of uncertainty to the political situation.
Martelly's stunning rise to power -- a year ago he was better known as an outrageous showman who got his clothes off during lewd stage performances -- has driven up expectations that he will have to fight hard to manage as president.
He has just three members of his own fledgling Repons Peyizan party to work with in parliament as he looks to forge deals with Unity, Preval's ruling party which firmed its grip on power in the legislative elections.
The unpopular Preval was barred by the Haitian constitution from serving more than two presidential terms.
First-round election results led to deadly riots in December after Martelly was said to have finished third and out of the race. An outcry led by the United States ushered in a team of international monitors who found massive fraud in favor of the ruling party candidate.
Preval's handpicked protege Jude Celestin was eliminated from the race in February and Martelly was reinstated to compete in a long-delayed run-off against former first lady Mirlande Manigat.
Although the momentum was with the surging Martelly, the margin of his 67 to 32 percent victory in the March 20 poll was emphatic, even if a turnout of less than 25 percent was extremely disappointing.
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