Yemen: Saleh wins big?

Al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya are both reporting that preliminary returns show that Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh has won big in the Presidential election, with 82% of the votes.   If those results stand, will they be seen as remotely credible?   Makes something of a mockery of the "hotly contested" election, but who knows - maybe the people just love their leader of 24 years that much.  Hey, it was closer than the Egyptian Presidential election last year, where Hosni Mubarak scored 88.6% of the vote in that hotly contested and totally free and fair election.  This year the Arab dictator running for re-election scored almost 7% less of the vote:   Freedom truly is on the march! 

Comments

[Stacey]

I think you're being slightly too cynical. At a certain point, it stopped being about whether Bin Shamlan would win, but rather how much he could take away from Salih, and I think there will be many in the JMP coalition backing Bin Shamlan who see this as a qualified victory. We can look at two things: how much better this is than 1999, and how much Salih may have had to concede in order to "pay off" (materially or otherwise) the groups and individuals who supported him.

The only really bleak point for me is al-Ahmar's position, which I commented on yesterday. In general, the election looks to me like one in which Salih had to work harder for a smaller return.

On the other hand, maybe I'm being too optimistic.

[the aardvark]

Hard to see some portion of 18% as even a moral victory.... but hey, when it comes to Arab elections I confess to cynicism.

[Barsawad]

Any Yemeni, or any one who has been to Yemen - would know that, this - has been a great achievement for us. This election, has been much freer and more heatedly contested than any in the Arab World; more so, the Egyptian and Tunisian ones.

[Laith]

Clearly any opposition candidate was not going to score any real percentages when the Islah party did not publicly back anyone. I am still unsure why they sat this one out (with some low level support for Shamlan).

I don't know why everyone forgets about Kuwait in terms of democracy in the region. Sure they have their own issues, but the opposition there actually has a majority bloc in parliment and can pass bills and question the cabinet.

[Stacey]

Laith - can you explain what you mean about Islah a bit more? I know about Ahmar's defection (and indeed, it was reported as a "defection" from his party's line), but from Qahtan on down the line, my understanding is that the Islahi leadership was very active in the JMP campaign. Is there something going on that I'm missing?

[aardvark]

Laith - I agree with Stacey, I'd love to hear more about your take on Islah. My impression from afar had been that they were working with Shamlan? I don't ignore Kuwait, though - blogged about it a bit when the elections happened. Interesting stuff.

Barsawad - I know that the election was extremely interesting, competitive, and exciting, that's what I wrote the other day. But that only makes the lopsided result that much more disappointing...

[Bill]

One sided elections are a symptom that the voters don't know what democracy is all about. They are thinking king, monarch, dictator and not administrator. Democracies are on auto pilot. The constitution is the ruler and the government officials it's operator. We seem to be having that problem in America. The voters are thinking of Bush as a temporary monarch with dictatorial powers. This probably has something to do with the notion that Jesus will some day return and be KING of earth, King of Kings that appoints all the other Kings.

[Jifry]

Dear A2,

I find that you, like too many folks, have leaped to extraordinary conclusions about this election, its conduct and consequences.

You write:

"Al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya are both reporting that preliminary returns show that Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh has won big in the Presidential election, with 82% of the votes. If those results stand, will they be seen as remotely credible? Makes something of a mockery of the "hotly contested" election, but who knows - maybe the people just love their leader of 24 years that much....:"

Please reread the al-Jazeera report:

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/B913D68A-83C0-44C3-96BA-0D37E283CBB2.htm

"With four per cent of the country's 27,000 ballot boxes counted on Thursday, Saleh had 82 per cent of the votes with Faisal al-Shamlan, the leading opposition candidate, trailing with 16 per cent."

The 82% favor for AAS is based on a mere 4% of the election returns! SAt noon EST the Supreme Commission for Elections and Referendum hasn't said which districts are reporting, it is most likely Sana'a which is a GPC stronghold. Hold on, A2, for the real results and their veracity we must wait.

In the meantime, if you are looking for fraud indicators in advance of an SCER or NGO audit look for the following:

If we don't get updated results by late this afternoon it could mean that the SCER has questions about results they are receiving. Also, we don't know the results for the local elections. If you find AAS winning in districts that returned large Islah, YSP, or independent local majorities that too could be suspicious.

As for the JMP's performance in this election, they did an excellent job of stabbing themselves in the back even for the ramshackle coalition they put together. Why is it so shocking that in bayt al-Ahmar father and son forgot which party they belonged to? Many families have a father, son and brother belonging to different political parties with little discomfort - how else can they can cover all bets? AAS helped this process along by handing the JMP even longer blades in the form of an amnesty granted to the 1994 separatist leadership in exile.

I will give you more later in the week, depending on when I can analyze SCER data.

Jifry

[aardvark]

Ah, but Jifry, al-Jazeera is reporting that the JMP is already challenging the vote and alleging fraud, and everybody is reporting the 82% number.

http://www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8DBBAFE3-8401-4BEB-B266-371F2DE1C788.htm

If the results don't stand, I'll be as delighted as anyone, but everyone (including the Yemenis) seem to be treating these as actual results.

[Amy H]

It seems to me that the significance of this election, if any, lies in whether it has strengthened institutions (such as the SCER) and practices (more effective opposition coalitions, civil society activism in the elections sphere) in such a way as to lay the groundwork for a more competitive vote in the election AFTER Saleh leaves the scene (and Ahmed runs?).

It is a little too soon to tell; but to help answer the question informed readers in Yemen could help us evaluate the role of the SCER. It is my impression that that body has become more of a tool of the GPC and Saleh with each passing election...am I right? And what about domestic observers? Were they independent and impartial, or were many of them coopted or deployed on behalf of the GPC? Etc.

[Amy H]

BTW, I also wanted to note that while I appreciated the NYT's article yesterday on Yemen (by Hassan Fatah), it was a little misleading, suggesting that the election commission, airtime for all candidates, etc. were somehow innovations for this election. In fact, as we know, such things are hardly new in Yemen! Maybe it was just the way the article read, or how I read it...anyway, media coverage that presents "Arab reform" in a very ahistorical way and suggests that all this election stuff is new is quite annoying...

[Jifry]

Patience, A2

I am reading now the accusations of election fraud, they are NOT being made by the JMP but by bin Shamlan's campaign manager, Zaid Shami. The JMP itself has not had time to confer, much less squirrel together a joint statement. Given that the party head of one of the major partners in the JMP endorsed AAS I don't think you should hold your breath waiting for one.

These accusations will only have traction if they are accepted by either SCER or NGO observer missions. Thus far they are not. SCER Chair Khaled Sharif has says that the SCER has not seen proof yet nor have any of the NGOs. The European Union Election Observation Mission has called the elections "an open and genuine contest" but is waiting for the results before issuing its report. NDI and IFES are also silent thus far, let's see what they say. Unless at least two of these NGOs say the plebiscite overall was suspicious the JMP will have a long way to go if it wants the election invalidated in the eyes of the international community.

Still no confirmed updated election results from SCER, Khaled Sharif says that with 25% of ballots counted (again, we don't know from where) AAS is still polling 80%.

As for being happy about the results standing or not standing, be careful. If you don't like the sound of AAS at 80%, then how about 60%, does that make you happy? This is where Zaid Shami currently puts it now, but to accept his number you would also have to believe or show that the vote fraud in AAS's favor was massive - to the tune of almost one million voters! In the absence of a Diebold machine that kind of fraud is either obvious or the NGO missions are too stupid in the Yemeni context to figure it out. Based on past experience I will hold my tongue on this point.

What's most important is that the elections are found to be free and fair or not free and fair, irrespective of what the numbers are. We can wait to take the NGOs to the woodshed or investigate how the so-called primitive, backward Yemenis have more clever accountants than Enron!

[Laith]

I didn't mean to imply that this blog ignored Kuwait...just that so much of the media coverage I have been reading on the elections seems to portray the elections in Yemen as such a singularly unique event in the region.

I am currently not in Yemen (nor am i Yemeni), but from what I have read and heard from some folks the Islah did not really get behind Shamlan like they could have. In any event it seems significant that the biggest (and by far best organized) oppositon group did not even field their own candidate.

[Stacey]

Amy: while I agree that some of the innovations Fattah mentions are not indeed new in Yemen, the depth of enforcement seems to be. Getting fair media time has been a disaster in the past (with opposition parties getting the 12 or 1 a.m. slot, versus the GPC campaigning at 7 p.m., etc.), and by all accounts, it was better this time to extent that we can say that it really happened (whereas in 1999 I would say that it was a regulation on paper only). When all is said and done, I think the NYT has done the best English-language coverage of the election.

Laith: It's funny...I'm not there either, nor am I Yemeni, but I'm hearing (and reading) pretty opposite interpretations of Islah's behavior; we must be talking to different people (which is, of itself, an interesting observation about interpretation). As to your claim that Islah did not "even" field their "own" candidate, I interpret it differently: they did, and it was Bin Shamlan. They obviously have poor party discipline (and since they usually don't, at least in comparative Yemeni terms, this should be considered a potentially strategic decision), but they DID back Bin Shamlan, and they DID campaign for him. Whether they did all that they "could have" is a subtelty that I would delay for later discussions, but it is certainly not fair to say that they didn't field a candidate; they were intimately involved in the choosing of Bin Shamlan and the conduct of the campagin, and deserve partial credit for what I'm still considering a qualified victory, just as Ahmar's defection and Zindani's equivocation make the party partially responsible for their "own" candidate's defeat.

Again, we're divided in interpretation, but since we're both drawing on local sources, there is obviously room to accomodate both interpretations (and probably others...)

[Jifry]

Yemen television, according to the BBC, is reporting final results for the presidential election: AAS @ 77%, bin Shamlan @ 21.8%.a

Ali al-Sarari, the JMP's spokesman, is declaring that the parties in his coalition are all contesting the result. No word yet as to whether the Islah party president actually shares this opinion.

The EUEOM mission head says that the election was "an open and genuine political contest" and a "milestone in Yemen's political history" that generally met international standards. The al-Sarari is claiming that it "has documents that prove the forging of two million votes, which were for Shamlan but were counted in favour of Saleh." In other words, the JMP is claiming that 40% of all votes cast were frauds!