The danger of compatibility

The peaceful revolutionaries in Yemen came out in 2011 to resolve the issue of democracy and prevent tyranny and inheritance, after two decades of adopting the democratic approach and political and party pluralism; but the clear result since 2011, and specifically since the agreement on the executive mechanism of the Gulf Initiative, is its elimination, or more precisely its freezing until now.

At first, the opposition parties justified the suspension of the constitution and parliament, adopting the Gulf initiative in its place, and reaching an agreement to complete the transitional phase. This did not pose a problem for the ruling party at the time, the General People's Congress, and Saleh. The coup against the democratic approach that was implemented in the constitution was an important entry point - of course, alongside other local, regional, and international factors - for the fall of the state and opened the door wide for the armed Houthi coup.

The political parties did not review the reasons for the fall again, and they went on to invent correct and incorrect justifications for the reasons for the fall, but no significant review took place, even after the launch of Operation Decisive Storm and the beginning of the armed popular resistance in 2015, and the intervention of the Arab coalition.

While the government failed to liberate most of the Yemeni cities and the war lines stopped in certain areas that moved only slightly, sometimes for the government and other times for the Houthis, no other review was conducted either, and the alliance was divided among itself, especially between Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and added other burdens and more powerful blows to democracy, until it recently reached the point where most of the members of the Presidential Leadership Council are military leaders, disregarding the constitution, state institutions, and their legal duties.

There is now a suitable opportunity on the horizon to amend the military situation between the government and the Houthis due to the strikes that Iran has received, especially in Syria, which we consider an occupying force in Yemen through the Houthis. However, the contradictions of the main forces in the Leadership Council and their inability to return to Yemen after ten years of voluntary exile, and their inability before that to preserve their financial resources from oil, the main source, and from taxes and customs from the ports, especially the ports of Aden, makes the opportunity go to waste, just as the efforts of the popular revolution in 2011 were wasted, and their insistence on ruling by consensus that destroys the state institutions, or rather, sharing and quotas that make that state and its revenues confined to a few categories of those forces.

The main purpose of fighting the Houthis and the Iranian occupation is to establish the rule of the republic with its democratic system, which is the same goal for which the people’s revolution took place in 2011. Since the political parties, social forces, and state institutions stand against this matter based on their experience during the past decade and a half, regardless of their justifications, this makes them enemies of the people with a rank only slightly lower than the Houthis and the Iranian occupation.

People’s coming out to celebrate the anniversary of September 26 does not only indicate their hostility to the Houthis, but to everyone who tries to overthrow the democratic system. If the political parties, especially the major ones, do not respond to the message that the masses shouted in several governorates and on social media, this means that the crisis of political and party pluralism in Yemen is in real danger, which is the pillar, essence and spirit of democracy, and that the survival of the forces that rely on violence and weapons will be stronger, and this will only lead to more wars that tear apart what remains of the country.