Maldives election: Ibrahim 'Ibu' Solih's struggle to retain power raises concerns of Male falling into China's influence

At first look, the huge and wholly unexpected reversal in his re-election bid suffered by Maldivian President Ibrahim ‘Ibu’ Solih should be seen as a setback for the nation’s still faltering democracy. On the contrary, it is a massive lesson in ethical politics and public administration that silent and unpretentious sections of the nation’s voters have taught their divided and at times divisive leadership(s). By pushing the presidential poll on Saturday, 9 September, into the second, run-off round, already slated for 30 September, that too with the incumbent running a distant second, the voter has shown who the real master is in a real democracy, and whom the governmental leadership especially should not take for granted or trifle with as inconsequential through and through. By favouring the Opposition PPM-PNC combine’s last-minute candidate and Male City Mayor, Mohamed Muizzu, with just three weeks of campaigning over the incumbent’s five-year developmental initiatives and unbelievably effective anti-Covid campaign, along with the accompanying revival of the mainstay tourism economy, the voters expressed their choice through a 46-39 per cent difference in vote-shares. This shift in support was not limited to specific demographics; it cut across islands and atolls, encompassing both men and women, students and the elderly as well as officegoers and fishermen. The message conveyed by the voters is a clear indication of what they believed had been wrong with their leadership all along. Even so, denying Muizzu a clear victory, which would have accrued only with the mandated 50-per cent vote-share, the voter has also told them all about those litle things that are still missing. At this stage, the fact is that should India-friendly Solih lose the presidency in the second run-off round, it could well redraw the geopolitical and geostrategic picture in favour of China in the immediate Indian Ocean neighbourhood as a whole. For India, coming as it does when New Delhi and the country as a whole have been celebrating Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s huge success at the G20 Summit that commenced on the very day of the Maldivian polls. It would compel the hosts to go back to the drawing board to address basic issues that have troubled the nation’s neighbourhood policy, extending beyond economic, development and healthcare assistance. What comes out of it all should be more enduring than anything in the past, given that bilateral relations since Maldives ushered in multiparty democracy in 2008 have seen too many ups and downs, not all of them India’s doing, as often misunderstood and/or misrepresented in Maldives. However, they need to be repaired in a way acceptable to the host nation and its populace. How they fared With a 79.43-per cent turnout in a total of 2,83,000 voters, the lowest in four presidential polls since 2008, Solih polled and recorded 85,989 (39.12 per cent) against Muizzu’s 101,128 votes (46.01 per cent). At the peak of the campaign, Solih had claimed a first-round victory with 1,30,000 votes in his kitty, enough for a comfortable victory with the traditional turnout closer to the 90 per cent mark, or 2,54,000 votes. In the final analysis, the turnout was much lower at 2,24,314 votes, including 5009 invalids – or, two-thirds of his promised target. It is not as if Solih alone got his figures wrong. The Democrats candidate, Ilyas Labeeb, polled only 7.07 per cent (15,539 votes) fell far short of the 40,000 votes that party founder and former president Mohammed ‘Anni’ claimed had been struck off the rolls of parent MDP when he lost the party primaries to incumbent Solih in January. Likewise, Jumhooree Party (JP) leader Gasim Ibrahim, a veteran of presidential polls in 2008 and 2013, polled only 5545 votes (2.52 per cent) when his party supposedly had a registered membership of 22,000 members. A new kid on the bloc, MNP founder and former Defence Minister Col Mohammed Nazim, an army veteran, got 1,896 votes, or 0.76 per cent, when he too had claimed over 10,000 members, to be entitled to State funding under the law. Less said the better about three other candidates, all of them independents. In fact, one-time defence minister, Umar Naseer, who had contested the 2008 presidential poll and lost miserably, with his 2.89 per cent votes, came fourth among the eight candidates. Faaris Maumoon with 1.37 per cent, and Hassan Zameel with 0.16 per cent, are the other two. Of them, Faaris is the son of former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom and is the president of the Maumoon Reforms Movement (MRM), whose registration remains contested in the court. Anti-incumbency A PhD holder in structural engineering and former Housing and Works Minister, Muizzu at 45 is the youngest of the presidential candidates. His choice was as controversial as the delays faced by his party boss and jailed former president Abdulla Yameen, whose appeals and hence poll-nomination too got stuck en route. The Supreme Court that had acquitted in the first of three money-laundering cases did not find any merit in his plea for sanction to contest, when his appeal against the 11-year-jail term was still pending before the High Court. Now, it looks as if the traditional democracy constituency of the MDP saw issues like such ‘appeal delays’, coalition breaks and government-induced defections, among others, as devious and manipulated. Most of them from the 30-per cent ‘swing voters’, either stayed home or voted against incumbent. All of them began standing out once the unending Solih-Nasheed tiff — that had frustrated them no end — was settled in the former’s favour in the MDP primaries in January. Team Solih then thought that defeating Nasheed, now Speaker and the first democracy President, who also used to be the nation’s most charismatic leader until then, tantamount to winning the presidency for a second term. But the voter did not think that it was only an internal matter for the ruling MDP, as happens only in communist nations. In context, even JP’s Gasim making a mockery of best practices by contesting the presidency and letting his wife Aishath Nahulla campaigning for him even when she continued in the Solih Cabinet, was an antic that his own traditional, supposedly non-elite constituency did not relish. But the list of ‘government-induced’ defection was endless and the operation went on until the very last minute, when one of Yameen’s lawyers and the presidential spokesman from his days, signed up for Solih, overnight. Unsaid outcomes Post-poll, both Solih and his MDP chairman and Economic Development Minister Fayyaz Ismail, have said that the poor turnout was among the reasons for the reversal. The national average this time was shy of 79 per cent, against close to 90 per cent in the past. The figure was 75 per cent for the cosmopolitan capital, Male, which accounted for 40 per cent of the nation’s population and a third of the electorate. The MDP leadership’s presumptions only show that they were full of themselves and were blind-and-deaf to independent pre-poll surveys that said as much. If yet, all those opinion polls went off the mark on individual vote-shares, it’s because the ‘silent majority’ voted in unison and with a vengeance – against the prevailing system, which the older generation thought that they had corrected through democratisation in 2008. The unsaid outcome after four presidential polls under the multi-party scheme is that democracy has caught on also with the frustrated youth, who account for 40 per cent of the electorate and whose legitimate aspirations, beginning with adequate employment opportunities, successive presidencies have failed. Certainly, fundamentalism and extremism are not their cuppa, at least for some more time, though there are terrorist elements – but only as much as they are prevalent in other democracies. The second and equally enduring outcome is that after dabbling with a multi-party scheme, where coalitions held sway and pre-poll bargaining cheapened the process, Maldives is slowly but surely veering round to the idea of a two-party system. Nasheed had observed as much after losing the 2013 presidential poll to Yameen. The 2023 message thus far is as much for his party and leadership. The third component is about the Maldivian voter’s urge for a ‘new face’ which Muizzu alone represented in the first-round poll. His perceived alienation from party boss Yameen may have helped him in the process. Whether or not he wins the presidency, Maldivian-watchers, and more so his PPM-PNC cadres and the rest, would be looking at Muizzu for early signs of ‘generational transition’ in national politics. Going beyond infrastructure The Solih presidency is noted for infrastructure projects in the islands that have long been neglected, even in relative terms. Yet, as the wag put it, between them, Solih all along and Muizzu, when they ‘caught on,’ may have promised more airports than islands for which they were meant. The Solih government also went about granting pay hikes to every segment of government employees and concessions to every other group, including taxi drivers (vehicle loans) and students (free bus and ferry service), making it all look like a mockery. What does it all mean for India? Not only is Solih (and also Nasheed) considered India-friendly, but Muizzu, by default as Yameen’s protege and proxy, is seen as pro-China and hence anti-India. Most of the Solih government’s infrastructure and social development projects, including water and drainage schemes, school and hospital buildings and stadiums in island after island, atoll after all, have been funded by India. Topping the list, of course, is the $500-million Thilamale Bridge, currently under construction, which is the single largest infrastructure project in the country and rivals the China-funded Sinamale bridge connecting Male and the airport island of Hulhule, built during Yameen’s presidency. This doesn’t imply that the Solih government is averse to China, either in foreign policy matters or project funding. Even during the campaign period, Maldives signed at least two agreements with Chinese firms. One was to install solar power storage batteries on 24 islands. The other pertains to the construction of 100-bed tertiary hospitals, one each in Kulhudhuffushi in the north, closer to India, and Thinadhoo in the south, not far from the Indian Ocean sea-lanes of communication (SLOCs). India as a campaign-point As the second of the two post-poll assessments, the MDP leadership has said that they had failed to adequately respond to insinuations against the incumbent and would do so this time round. The reference is to India, and the indication was that the MDP (too) would be making it a talking-point in the second-round campaign. Though Muizzu was hedging in the early days, later, as if on cue (from jailed Yameen), he talked about ‘protecting the nation’s independence and sovereignty’, especially after the likes of Gasim Ibrahim and Col Nazim campaigned on the issue. In the PPM-PNC lexicon, it is targeting India indirectly, after Yameen had done with his ‘India Out’ campaign, more openly, until it became ineffective on the streets. While outside the prison, Yameen has wantonly switched between ‘India Out’ and ‘India Military Out’, implying that his party in power would only revive his government’s call for New Delhi to take back the three aircraft and their pilots and technicians, who work under the specific command of the local armed forces, MNDF, and only on specific anti-drugs reconnaissance and medical missions. The PPM-PNC combine continues to depict as ‘military personnel’ and want them out. The Yameen camp has also been consistently targeting the India-funded Uthara Thila Falhu (UTF) coast guard harbour, originally planned under his regime and initiated by the Solih government. They now want New Delhi to be moved out of the project, too. All this is apart from the on-again-off-again campaign on the IMBL issue involving southern neighbour Mauritius, on which President Solih’s letter to Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth got leaked in the social media. The government has promptly authenticated the contents of the missive, which supports Team Solih’s contention that the president had not compromised Maldivian interests any which way. Convenient at present During his campaign, Muizzu promised not to stall Solih-initiated projects including the Thilamale Bridge, but only review them and speed them up. It is as loaded a statement as Yameen’s 2013 promise to speed up the Male airport project if elected – only to banish India’s GMR Group after paying hefty damages and invite China to build a second runway. Now, while talking about allies for the second round, ensuring Maldives’ ‘independence and sovereignty’ were his only condition. He was only referring to India without naming it, after Yameen lawyers had gone public on the latter’s continued support for Muizzu’s candidacy in the second round, and indicating the same as if it were a pre-condition. But then, Muizzu, and also Team Solih, should realise that all the votes that the former got or the latter did not get had nothing to do with India or the nation’s foreign policy, as both find it convenient at present. It was an election based exclusively on domestic issues, starting with democracy principles, jobs and incomes. If anyone were to think otherwise, and act otherwise if elected to power, they would only be violating their mandate and face the same pitfalls that they are facing at the end of the first round. And that is another and equally important message from the first round. The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views. Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.