Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled Yemen for 33-year formally steps down this week after Yemenis anoint a new president in an election many hope will give Yemen a chance for democracy.
No ceremonies are expected to mark the end for Saleh, who once compared his 33-year rule of Yemen to “dancing on the heads of snakes’’is out of the country for treatment in the U.S. for injuries he sustained in an assassination attempt last June.
But the election, in which Saleh's deputy Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi is the only candidate, is expected to pave the way for Yemen to introduce political and economic reforms and give it a chance to restructure security forces currently run by the outgoing president's relatives.
Before he flew to the U.S. last month, Saleh apologised for “any shortcoming” in his rule and said he planned to come back.
“I will return to Sanaa as head of the General People's Congress party,” he told senior party and government officials in a televised speech before his departure on Jan. 22.
From January 2011 he struggled to quell big popular protests against his rule as a spate of gun battles pushed Yemen closer to civil war.
The violence culminated in deadly clashes between forces of the Hashed tribal group and government troops.
Under mounting pressure, Saleh agreed to sign a Gulf accord in November that was meant to see him gradually relinquish power.
But fears remain that the accord, inked in Saudi Arabia, the world's No. 1 oil exporter which shares a long porous border with Yemen, may not provide the impoverished Arabian Peninsula state with a roadmap out of misery and chaos.
The bombing of Saleh's compound in June, an apparent assassination attempt, left Saleh with severe burns, forcing him to seek treatment in Saudi Arabia, one of Yemen's resource-rich neighbours which had tried in vain to ease him from power.
Ever nimble, Saleh reneged on three deals to transfer power before the attempt on his life and shrugged off U.S. and Saudi pressure to stay in exile, making good on a promise to return home in September.
But international pressure redoubled in October, when the UN Security Council adopted a resolution demanding he sign a handover plan brokered by Gulf neighbours.
France and Britain hinted at EU sanctions against him.
The U.S. has talked openly of its concern about who might succeed Saleh, an ally in the fight against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based wing of the militant group.
Until last year, Saleh's grip on power seemed unshakeable.
In 2010, supporters pushed for constitutional changes to allow him unlimited five-year terms as president.
Speculation was high that he was grooming one of his sons as a possible successor.
But popular uprisings that toppled Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak resonated in Yemen, drawing tens of thousands to daily protests in Sanaa and in Taiz to the south, threatening his apparent dynastic ambitions.
Saleh began to offer concessions.
First, he said he would not stand for re-election in 2013 and dismissed the idea of his son succeeding him.
Then he offered a referendum on a new constitution by the end of the year and a shift to a truly democratic “parliamentary system”.
But after the death of 52 protesters in March, mostly by sniper fire, a string of generals, tribal leaders, diplomats and ministers either resigned or switched their allegiance to the protesters.
They included key figures in the al-Ahmar and Sanhan tribes, kinsmen who Saleh had placed in key military and other positions.
When confronted with a power transfer deal brokered by the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council, Saleh was forced to accept that he has lost the ability to win back his former allies, and sign up to the deal.
Saleh became the ruler of North Yemen in 1978 at a time when the south was a separate communist country, and has led the unified country since the two states merged in 1990.