Patronage politics and elite cohesion in Yemen

Ali Abdullah Saleh became president of North Yemen in 1978, and of unified Yemen in 1990, until his final ousting in 2011 when he agreed to transfer power to his long-standing vice president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. During his thirty years of rule, Saleh, who hailed from the small Sanhan tribe, forged a political settlement regulated by a “politics of permanent crisis” alternating repression and co-option (Phillips 2011). Describing his ability to weather several political, security and socio-economic threats, Saleh himself compared ruling Yemen to “dancing on the heads of snakes” (Clark 2010). Saleh’s regime constitutes an example of ‘limited access order’, where leaders control and restrict access to the system for non-elites in order to create rents and distribute patronage to selected elite groups (Phillips 2011: 59). Generating expectations that the rents extracted under peacetime conditions exceed those extracted through the use of violence, this mechanism is an essential means to control violence, limit competition and secure the survival of the regime (North et al. 2013: 38).

Under Saleh, the Yemeni elite was comprised of several groups holding uneven levels of power and influence (Phillips 2011). The regime’s inner circle, a shadowy clique that included the president himself, his closest relatives and the Sanhan tribal elite, occupied key positions in the army and the security services while also controlling large sectors of the national economy. A disparate network of tribal and religious leaders constituted the outer circle of the regime’s core, which also disproportionately benefitted from the regime’s patronage. Finally, selected political dynasties, business and political party elites, technocrats and co-opted opposition groups were included in the patronage system,

and retained intermittent political influence, as long as they accepted the informal rules of the game and provided a minimum level of support to the regime (Alley 2010).

Although patronage was distributed broadly, it sowed discontent among excluded elites and the wider population, which saw little in the way of trickle-down effects from state patronage. It also resulted in the manipulation of Yemen’s tribal system (Phillips 2011).

By elevating prominent tribal shaykhs to senior government and military positions, Saleh bolstered the tribal order in order to eradicate Hashemite and southern influences from northern and southern Yemen (Clark 2010: 154). While the system allowed shaykhs to extend their influence well beyond their traditional tribal fiefdoms,³⁹ it created disparities and made them increasingly dependent on state patronage, supposedly insulating central government from the threat posed by heavily armed tribes (Brandt 2017: 57). Their political influence was limited, and patronage typically consisted of privileged access to contraband trade or the regular payment of stipends, which often alienated them from the communities they claimed to represent (Phillips 2011: 53). According to Higley and Burton’s framework, Saleh’s elites are identified with an ideocratic model centred around a highly cohesive inner circle, largely consisting of family kin and tribal allies which created a relatively stable but unrepresentative regime.

The collapse of Saleh’s regime in 2011 was the result of two concomitant and interacting factors. On the one hand, the popular belief that without Saleh and his regime the country would disintegrate dissolved, and millions of Yemeni citizens followed the steps of protesters in other Arab countries (Alwazir 2011). On the other hand, the defection of key military and tribal elites – including military leader Ali Mohsin al Ahmar and the paramount shaykhs (shaykh mashaykh) of the Hashid and Bakil tribal confederations – over Saleh’s attempts to centralise power and groom his son Ahmed Ali as successor, thus sidelining his designated successor Ali Mohsin, constituted a major blow to the regime. Nevertheless, Saleh could still rely on the elite Republican Guard, Central Security Forces, and other loyal army units, whose commanders included his sons and nephews (Barany 2011: 33). After months of protracted negotiations and mounting international pressure, Saleh agreed to sign an agreement brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to hand power to his former defence minister and vice president Hadi.

39 Brandt (2014) referred to the northern shaykhs serving as army officials as colonel shaykhs.

Lacking popular support and an autonomous domestic power base, the new president turned to the influential patrons who had previously defected from Saleh’s regime, including Ali Mohsin and the al-Ahmar clan whose influence extended over the Hashid confederation and the former opposition al-Islah party (Transfeld 2016). Their support was critical to pushing military and bureaucratic reforms aimed at curbing Saleh’s influence within state institutions and the GPC: Hadi’s appointments in government, the judiciary and military bodies reveal how the transition process sought to eradicate Saleh’s centralised patronage system to replace it with “a political order with multiple patrons and power centres” (Thiel 2018: 123). However, Hadi also attempted to reduce his dependence on Ali Mohsin and al-Ahmar by steering the NDC – of which he had laid down the rules and imposed significant presidential quotas – and later dismissing senior government officials close to his patrons.

At the same time, Saleh resisted Hadi’s military reforms that would eventually result in sidelining him and his loyalists. As the new president purged his predecessor’s family members under the pretext of restructuring the army, Saleh mobilised his extensive patronage network which stretched across the party system, the media and the tribes against Hadi and his allies (Carvajal 2015). As a result, Saleh successfully blocked reforms undermining his family interests in the NDC while also establishing contacts with the Houthis through mediation committees and qat chews (Transfeld 2016: 163; United Nations 2016a: 16).

Mutual distrust and profound divisions therefore marked elite relations between 2012 and 2014. While Saleh had managed to craft a cohesive inner circle largely consisting of kin, fellow tribesmen and loyalists, Hadi’s bid to consolidate his power clashed with the interests of Islah-aligned political actors. Contrary to the Saleh era, no actor or group was now able to exercise a monopoly in the political marketplace (De Waal 2015), and elites increasingly attempted to co-opt outsider actors to overcome their relative weaknesses and gain leverage vis à vis their rivals. In this context, the Houthis emerged as Yemen’s critical power broker. The transitional period’s elites therefore conform to the fragmented elite model, where weak institutionalisation and conflictual elites resulted in an unstable but more representative regime.