Ali Abdullah Saleh became Yemen's first directly elected president in the 1999 presidential election, winning 96.2 per cent of the vote. The only other candidate, Najeeb Qahtan Al-Sha'abi, was the son of Qahtan Muhammad al-Sha'abi, a former president of South Yemen. Though a member of Saleh's General People's Congress (GPC) party, Najeeb ran as an independent.