WORLD
Yemen elects new leader
Baku, February 25 (AZERTAC). Yemen’s Supermen Committee for Elections and Referendum (SCER) said Friday evening that Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi was elected as the country’s new president with 6.6 million people voting for him.
Hadi, the sole candidate of the early election that took place on Tuesday, is to lead Yemen’s transitional government in the next two years.
The turnout stood at about 65 percent, as "a total of 6,660,039 voters took part in the elections on Tuesday, out of 10,243,364 eligible registered voters in the elections," the SCER said at a press conference in Sanaa.
"A total of 6,646,718 people voted for Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, so Hadi got about 99.8 percent of votes in Tuesday’s polls," the SCER added.
The electoral officials said that Hadi will be sworn in at the parliament on Saturday, while the inauguration ceremony is set for Feb. 27, when Hadi’s predecessor Ali Abdullah Saleh will handed over the presidential palace to him.
The 66-year-old new president has pledged to carry out reforms during his transitional term and is set to launch a national dialogue with all political factions in Yemen after he takes office, as well as to combat resurgent al-Qaida off-shoot.
The early presidential election came as part of a negotiated settlement initiated by neighboring oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Council countries with the aim of ending one-year-old massive protests against Saleh.