Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika submitted on Tuesday his resignation following weeks of protests demanding his ouster.
The move came after army chief of staff Lieutenant General Ahmed Gaid Salah demanded immediate constitutional procedures to remove the ailing, 82-year-old leader from office.
"There is no more room to waste time," state news agency APS quoted him as saying.
Bouteflika, who uses a wheelchair, said last month he would pull out of the race and postponed April elections, in moves that angered protesters who saw it as a ploy to extend his two decades in power.
On Monday, Bouteflika, who was in power for 20 years, had said he would quit before the end of his term on April 28.
But a protest leader and opposition parties rejected this as insufficient, while hundreds of students marched through the capital Algiers to demand to replacement of a political system widely seen as incapable of significant reform.
Bouteflika has rarely seen in public since he suffered a stroke in 2013.
A fighter in the 1954-1962 war to end French colonial rule, Bouteflika became independent Algeria’s first foreign minister and one of the forces behind the Non-Aligned Movement that gave a global voice to Africa, Asia and Latin America.
He championed post-colonial states, challenged what he saw as the hegemony of the United States and helped turn his country into a seed-bed of 1960s idealism.
He welcomed Che Guevara, and a young Nelson Mandela got his first military training in Algeria.
As president of the UN General Assembly, Bouteflika invited Yasser Arafat to address the body in 1974, a historic step towards international recognition of the Palestinian cause.
By the end of the 1970s, though, Bouteflika had fallen from favor at home and went into exile. He returned to public life when Algeria was being ravaged by a conflict with Islamist militants which killed an estimated 200,000 people.
Bouteflika, backed by the military, was elected president in 1999 with a pledge to stop the fighting. Against fierce opposition from the establishment, he gave an amnesty to militants who laid down their arms. The violence declined dramatically.
Helped by oil and gas revenues, Algeria became more peaceful and richer. But it remains mired in corruption and political and economic torpor.
He won re-election in 2004 and again in 2009, although his opponents said the votes were rigged. Through a series of ferocious turf battles with his security forces behind the scenes, Bouteflika had, by the start of his third term, become Algerian’s most powerful president in 30 years.
He consolidated that power last year by dismissing about a dozen top military officers.
Age and poor health caught up with him. French doctors operated on him in 2005 for what officials said was a stomach ulcer. Leaked US diplomatic cables said he was suffering from cancer. He became weaker after his mother died in 2009.
Bouteflika said in a speech in Setif, in eastern Algeria, in May 2012 that it was time for his generation to hand over to new leaders. “For us, it’s over,” he said.
Months later at the start of 2013, a stroke put him into a Paris hospital for three months. He was seen little in public after returning to Algeria to convalesce.
With a cushion of foreign reserves and a population wary of major upheaval after their civil war, Algeria avoided the Arab Spring revolutions that toppled leaders across the region in 2011.
But protests against poor living standards, the lack of job opportunities and services were common even before the mass protests, and foreign investors are keen for economic reforms that will cut the red tape that often hampers business.
