[Preliminary results from the vote on Saturday showed that the Maldivian Democratic Party was on track to win more than two-thirds of the 87 seats in the country’s parliament, the local news media reported on Sunday. It needs just 44 seats to become the first party to secure a parliamentary majority since the Maldives held its first free election in 2008.]
By Mike
Ives
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President Ibrahim Mohamed
Solih, center left, of the Maldives, along with former
President Mohamed
Nasheed, center right, at an election campaign rally in
Malé, the capital, this
month. Credit Ashwa Faheem/Reuters
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HONG
KONG — A political party led by the
president of the Maldives appeared to have won decisively in parliamentary
elections over the weekend, a result that may help him restore political
freedoms in a strategically important country with an authoritarian past.
The president, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, had won a
resounding victory in presidential elections last September. But parts of his
party’s agenda have been stymied because some of its allies in a governing
coalition are aligned with a former strongman leader, Abdulla Yameen, who has
been widely accused of corruption and repression.
The Maldives, a chain of islands southwest of
India, has traditionally fallen within New Delhi’s sphere of influence. Yet it
also stretches across maritime routes that are crucial to China, and Beijing
has recently spent hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure projects
in the Maldives.
Critics have warned of the Maldives falling
prey to “debt-trap diplomacy,” meaning that it could be pressured to offer
security concessions to China as repayment for large loans. Some politicians,
as well as Western and Indian diplomats, have warned that a growing dependence
on China could be a threat to the country’s sovereignty.
Some political analysts saw the victory last
year for Mr. Solih, who has been skeptical of China’s influence, as good news
for India’s interests. On Sunday, a news article in The Economic Times, an
Indian newspaper, described the parliamentary rout by Mr. Solih’s Maldivian
Democratic Party as a “shot in arm” for New Delhi in its “neighborhood.”
Still, Constantino Xavier, a foreign policy
fellow at Brookings India in New Delhi, said the “lure of cheap and easy money”
made it likely that the Maldives’s relationship with China would deepen,
“despite everything that leaders will say in public.”
“In the long term, the natural tendency of any
leader in the Maldives will be to increase ties with China,” he said. “China
has that financial power to deliver quickly and effectively.”
Preliminary results from the vote on Saturday
showed that the Maldivian Democratic Party was on track to win more than
two-thirds of the 87 seats in the country’s parliament, the local news media
reported on Sunday. It needs just 44 seats to become the first party to secure
a parliamentary majority since the Maldives held its first free election in
2008.
Other parties won fewer than seven seats each
on Saturday, according to The Maldives Independent, a local news site.
Past elections in the Maldives have been marred
by accusations of widespread irregularities. Mr. Yameen was accused of rigging
the presidential election last year by forcing employees of state-owned
companies to vote for his party, stacking the election commission with
loyalists, locking up opposition leaders and canceling voter registrations.
But Transparency Maldives, an election
watchdog, said in a statement on Sunday that the previous day’s vote had been
“transparent and generally well administered.”
Mr. Solih said in a statement over the weekend
that the country’s people were the election’s “biggest winners.”
“That our campaign was issue-oriented and not
based on hatred and narrow divisions is a win for our young democracy,” he
said. “That our government did not hinder those candidates with whom we did not
agree is a big win for the country.”
The Maldives made international headlines last
winter when Mr. Yameen, the president at the time, set off a political crisis
by declaring a state of emergency and sending troops to surround the Supreme
Court. The move came the week after the court overturned criminal convictions
against nine of Mr. Yameen’s opponents.
One of them was a former president, Mohamed
Nasheed, a member of the Maldivian Democratic Party who was then living in
exile in London. Mr. Nasheed, who returned to the Maldives in late 2018, was
ineligible to run in the September election because he had been sentenced to
prison under the Yameen government.
Mr. Solih ran for president in Mr. Nasheed’s
place.
On the campaign trail last year, Mr. Solih
pledged to restore democratic freedoms if he won, including rolling back an
anti-defamation law that Mr. Yameen had introduced as a tool for locking up
opponents.
The anti-defamation act was repealed two months
later. But Mr. Solih’s party has struggled in recent months to carry out other
parts of its agenda.
For example, even though Mr. Solih has promised
to investigate the 2014 disappearance of Ahmed Rilwan Abdulla, a prominent
journalist critical of Mr. Yameen, a party in the Maldivian Democratic Party’s
governing coalition refused in February to call a vote on a bill about
recovering stolen assets and investigating unresolved murders.
Mr. Yameen, the former strongman president, was
recently imprisoned over a graft scandal involving the country’s tourism board.
He denies the accusations and was released on bail in late March, days before
the parliamentary elections.
Kai Schultz contributed reporting from
New Delhi, and Hassan Moosa from Malé, Maldives.
