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Yemen voters elect new leader to end Saleh rule →
During the Cold War we Westerners would hear about elections in Soviet Bloc countries with only one name on the ballot. I always accounted this as one of the great insults of authoritarianism to human dignity: appropriating the forms of democratic governance while flaunting the absence of true popular sovereignty. It seems like an exercise in faux-democracy as flagrantly oppressive in its own way as Stalin’s artists who painted out discredited members of the party from official paintings, but did so with an apparently purposeful awkwardness that left the doctoring all-too-obvious to anyone who cared to look.
Well, if anyone out there is feeling nostalgic for the Cold War, I’m here to tell you that these days are not entirely over. Yemen is now conducting an election with a single name on the ballot, that of acting president Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who has been vice president to the consumately slippery Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has several times avoided stepping down as president after having promised to do so.
If the election successfully brings a decisive end to Saleh’s presidency and allows Yemen to move forward, then it must be considered a good thing, however bad a precedent it sets to hold an election with a single name on the ballot. I wish the Yemenis well, but I am worried on their behalf.
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