Yemeni parties have been fond of the term “consensual legitimacy” since 2010, when opposition parties that fall under the umbrella of the Joint Meetings Parties (JMP) signed an agreement with the General People’s Congress (GPC), which was headed by then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The agreement stipulated postponing parliamentary elections — which have not been held since 2003 — until the electoral system and the Supreme Committee for Elections are reviewed and reformed.
The revolution exploded in 2011 and resulted in the Gulf Initiative, which produced a consensus president and a government of national reconciliation. This revived the concept of “consensual legitimacy,” which means the parties reach agreements by consensus. But conflict restarted, as happened with the 2010 agreement, and a political fight exploded in 2011. Then, the Gulf Initiative, signed in November 2011, was unable to achieve the minimum of the people’s aspirations amid the elites justifying the agreement’s defects. Despite that, the transitional phase, which was supposed to expire in February 2014, was extended under the pretext of political consensus and that the transitional phase was a “mission” and not a time period.
The Gulf Initiative lowered the ceiling of the 2011 Yemeni events. It turned a revolution into a mere crisis, as written in the agreement, which was opposed by some independent and partisan youths because it ignored the event’s popular factor and portrayed it as a political dispute among Yemeni parties. It also granted legal immunity for all crimes committed during Saleh’s rule for three decades.
But the Gulf Initiative was passed with the people’s consent under the pressure of the dire living situation, which included power outages and shortages of water, gasoline and diesel fuel. This means that providing basic services to citizens is the minimum required to maintain the legitimacy of any government. The Yemeni people agreed to the Gulf Initiative only because they wanted these basic government services. But the supply crises continued, raising questions about the legitimacy of the current government and why these services were not being provided.
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