'Obama supports mocked elections in Yemen'

The polls opened Tuesday, with 12 million eligible voters, and the sole candidate is Vice President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

The election is to put an end to Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh’s 33-year rule and formally transfer power to his assistant, Hadi.

Press TV has interviewed Lawrence Davidson, professor of West Chester University, to shed more light on the issue. What follows is the text of the interview:

Press TV: An election with just one candidate who symbolizes the very regime the people rose up against. What can be said about Yemen's path to democracy?

Davidson: Well, it is not a path to democracy, is it? I think that Mansour Hadi who has been the vice president for 18 years will in fact try to lay the basis for the return or the maintenance of the party that rules now, the General People’s Congress.

So some people claim that this is a symbolic move or break with the past but it is very difficult to see in pragmatic terms how this can possibly be.

Hadi is Saleh’s man and the security forces are in the hands of Saleh’s family. So even if Saleh never shows up, if he never even comes back, though he says he is going to come back, even if he does not, I mean the same structure, the same kind of regime will go on under these conditions.

So I can see how this is either a path to democracy or a path to stability. I think that this is not going to work.

Press TV: With anti-election protests still raging on in Yemen, what kind of legitimacy would these elections hold in the eyes of Yemenis and the international community?

Davidson: I think that in the eyes of many Yemenis, both in the north and the south, they will not give any legitimacy to whoever is running the show here.

However, to the international community, this can be used as a symbol of stability and this is the horse they are putting their money on, so to speak.

So already President Obama has come out in support of the elections and Hadi. Certainly the [Persian] Gulf States are betting that this is going to kind of tempered down, the protest movement, but actually my feeling is that this is a prelude to civil war.

Press TV: Having not fielded any candidates of their own, would you say the Yemeni opposition parties have failed their people?

Davidson: I am not sure exactly how much opportunity they were given to do that. So it is really not a question that I can answer.

If they failed in anyway, it is through not being able to establish some sort of united front to bring down the regime completely and that is really where the failure lies.

They have allowed themselves to continue to be fragmented. So things are going to get very messy.