SEPTEMBER 2006 brought an unprecedented development in the Middle East: The government of Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh held open, contested presidential elections. Candidates were able to rally and campaign freely, each of the five candidates was given equal airtime on state-run television, and the international press and elections monitors were welcomed to Yemen to observe. This homegrown move toward democracy represents a remarkable political experiment that, if successful, will provide the region with a model of a state that is Arab, Islamic, genuinely democratic, and untainted by American interference.

Of course, the incumbent won. As the second-longest serving head of state in the Middle East, behind Libya’s Mu’ammar Qaddafi, it is not surprising that Saleh was elected to serve another seven-year term. What is surprising is that, as an editorial in the Yemen Times put it following the elections, Yemen has “removed the 99% victor stereotype.” Saleh got 77.2 percent of the vote, while his chief rival, the charismatic oil magnate Faisal bin Shamlan, received 21.8 percent. This is in sharp contrast to Yemen’s previous presidential “elections,” in which Saleh received 96 percent of the vote. Recent “free elections” elsewhere in the Middle East have resulted in votes for the authoritarian incumbent of 88.6 percent (in Egypt) and 94.5 percent (in Tunisia). Leslie Campbell, Director of the National Democratic Institute’s Middle East Program, which assisted in monitoring Yemen’s elections, says that in this year’s elections, Saleh’s campaign managers “actually were worried. I think that for an Arab incumbent to only get 70-some percent of the vote would be pretty hard for him to take. This wasn’t just a showpiece election.”