Maldives: After EC, SC denies nomination to Yameen, Solih faces record seven rivals

With the Maldivian Supreme Court (SC) upholding the Election Commission’s (EC) rejection of the candidature of the jailed ex-president Abdulla Yameen of the Opposition PPM-PNC combine, President Ibrahim ‘Ibu’ Solih faces seven contenders in his re-election bid, slated for September. The list includes PPM-PNC replacement and Male Mayor, Dr Mohamed Muizzu with Yameen’s reluctant support, and parliamentarian Ilays Labeeb of “The Democrats”, a party founded by Parliament Speaker Mohamed ‘Anni’ Nasheed after he lost the hotly-contested presidential preliminary election of the ruling Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) to the incumbent.

Others in the list include two of Solih’s erstwhile allies, Gasim Ibrahim of the Jumhooree Party (JP) and Faris Maumoon of the MRM, who is contesting as an ‘Independent’, even after the civil court had stayed the EC’s decision to de-register the party for not maintaining the mandated minimum of 3,000 voters.  The newest Maldivian National Party (MNP) is represented by founder, Col Mohamed Nazim (retd), an erstwhile defence minister under the Yameen presidency (2013-18).

Of the two other Independents, Umar Naseer is an estranged Home Minister of Yameen and had contested the maiden multi-party presidential poll of 2008.Former junior minister Hassan Zameel’s ticket will be remembered for the first woman running-mate – Mariyam Aleem, his wife. The Democrats had originally named Deputy Speaker Eva Abdualla, a cousin of Nasheed, as Ilays’ veepee choice, but she was replaced by a male candidate, later on.

Two-phase poll

Maldives has a two-phase presidential election with the top two from the first round facing off in the run-off, if no one obtains the mandated 50 per cent minimum. For the record, of the three presidential polls under the 2008 Constitution, only in the last, 2018, there was a first-round result after all anti-Yameen parties and interest groups jointly backed the MDP’s Solih in a straight contest. Both Nasheed (2008) and Yameen (2013) had won their five-year term in the second round.

This time round, the EC has slated the two rounds for 9 and 30 September, and President Solih has reiterated his confidence that he would make it in the first round. So have some of the other candidates. Solih however has an advantage, both as an incumbent and also as the first candidate to launch his nation-wide campaign, where residents of far-flung islanders expect the candidates to make at least one appearance before polling day. Because he started early, the incumbent may be able to honour the voter-expectation while others may have to rely even more on the television and social media.

But this election is not about greater expectations, both fulfilled and unfulfilled. Such a construct puts the incumbent in focus, an election centred on the traditional ‘incumbency factor’, for and against. Until his exit, Yameen was the central piece of this election, as the rest of the polity (including the incumbent up to a point) were reading the signals emanating from his prison-room, to strategise for the next day, next week, up to the very day the nominations closed on 7 August. This has made the campaign, both easy and difficult for Solih.

Pro-democracy constituency

Maldives is a young democracy, and democratic values influence individual choice for presidency as developmental agenda and governance issues (pertaining to corruption, nepotism, etc). Swing voters continue to constitute a substantial part of the electorate and have sealed the three previous elections. According to EC records, 42 per cent of the voters have not signed up for any political party. Independent assessments, together with ‘non-serious members’ of political parties who otherwise value democratic principles, this figure could cross the half-way mark.

With Yameen not in the fray now, these constituents would naturally be evaluating the democratic credentials and governance issues pertaining to the current leadership. Overnight and possibly unintended, the election has become Solih-centric. Nasheed and his Democrats especially can be expected to try and exploit the situation, they having projected the Solih leadership as either corrupt or shading the corrupt, starting with the controversial ventilator-import scam during Covid pandemic in 2020 and forcing the resignation of then Health Minister Abdulla Ameen. Whether Nasheed could make other scam-claims stick either to the Government or the Solih leadership is a million-dollar question.

At the same time, voters, especially of pro-democracy mind-set, are still not happy with Nasheed’s persistent effort at upsetting the apple-cart for the President of his own choice, and bringing a bad name to the MDP and the Government through much of the past five years.  This section needs to feel confident or pressured about the future course that the nation might take, for them to venture out to cast their vote in the first place.

Dissecting the swing-voter mind-set further, their priorities shift from election to election, and from issue to issue, and at times, leader to leader. There is no other reason why and how Yameen could have won in 2013, that too against Nasheed, who was still considered the most charismatic and popular leader in the country. That myth was blown only in the MDP primaries earlier this year. Then as since, the ‘MDP-sympathetic’ voters had seen Yameen as less of a democrat, just as his half-brother Gayoom used to be through the previous decade, when the younger sibling was a senior minister.

Development galore

Yameen is still considered a ‘development man’, so has Team Solih projected him to be one. There is a subtle difference. Apart from funding sources, respectively China in the case of Yameen and mostly India for Solih, there were conceptual differences too. Yameen was the first one to develop huge physical infrastructure like the Sinamale sea-bridge, connecting capital Male with airport-island Hulhule. Not stopping with the nation’s single-largest project, the $ 500 million Thialamale sea-bridge, which when completed would help in further industrialisation of the nation would also facilitate de-congestion of Male.

The city of Male is still the most congested South Asian capital, with population-density and land-costs competing with each other, more than the previous year.  It is here that Solih’s strategized distribution of housing plots and completed flats, respectively in Male city and suburban Hulhumale reclamation island in the months and weeks leading up to the presidential poll assumes importance. It is here that the Muizzu ticket could make a difference.

Many voters, cutting across party ideologies and identities, still see him as the ‘architect of housing and infrastructure revolution’ first under the short-lived Waheed presidency (2012-13), followed by a full term under the equally innovative and enterprising President Yameen. He was already a well-known engineering professional before entering politics, and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in structural engineering from the University of London, and a PhD in civil engineering from the University of Leeds.

Yet, Muizzu is also seen as more than a religious conservative though not an extremist. There is a religion-centric constituency, whose sentiments could be whipped up, more by events and developments outside the country, especially West Asia – but not stopping there. As Male mayor over the past years, Muizzu put up electrified sign-boards with Koranic verses across the city, and followed it up with full-scale illumination for this year’s nine-day Bakrid holiday, last month – reportedly unprecedented in the Islamic world.

Local Salafi and other fundamentalist leaders lost no time in hailing him as ‘our man’ after the PNC senate elected him Yameen’s ‘alternate candidate’, that too after defying the latter’s suggestion to continue boycotting the poll. Unlike conservative Islamic support, this one can cut both ways, especially with urban moderates and first-generation voters who may otherwise be desirous of ‘change’ may shun the Yameen camp for this one reason.

Subtle and the abrasive

If there is one election of the kind where presidential aspirants have committed multiple gaffes, and possibly not just in the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago, it is this. From the people’s perception it has reached the dangerous proportion of their leaders’ obsession with personal power with no reference or relation to politics and policies. The question is who takes the cake, especially among Solih, Yameen and Nasheed, though not necessarily in that order.

Taking the Solih-Nasheed combo first for obvious reasons, it was one’s subtleties against the other’s raw and regal approach, bordering on abrasiveness. That the former won as Solih cleared all the policy and political hurdles placed on his path by a more vocal Nasheed apart, the former has also sent out the kind of street-smartness and political cunning that the common man has all along associated only with Yameen, and at times his estranged half-brother Gayoom when he was President.

It is thus that while Nasheed made himself uncomfortable with Solih’s allies from 2018 by openly seeking their marginalisation, the latter stood by them through and through, only for them to see him as a more dangerous enemy than any other in the country to have. This is after minister after minister from ally after ally – two of the three from the 2018 past, to be precise – disowned their parties, to retain their ministerial and other positions, which were given to them only at the behest of the party. It had begun with Vice-President Faisal Naseem, a JP nominee, who had hoped to be retained as Solih’s running-mate after parting company with one-time boss, Gasim Ibrahim.

By choosing fellow MDP member, Aslam as his running-mate, the President has done what Nasheed had all along wanted, but in a way he could defend and even justify himself for keeping the coalition that elected him intact until the very end of the term for which he was elected. Team Solih members are also not tired of pointing out that barring the religion-centric Adhaalath Party (AP), the two old allies left the coalition only because of their leaders’ presidential ambitions. They pooh-pooh the erstwhile allies’ allegations that Solih had violated the ‘coalition code’ on many occasions, in policy-making, political decisions and personnel choices.

Gaffe crown

Yet, the crown for the gaffes should go to none other than Yameen, which has since painted him as more selfish than most others. All through his months in prison after the criminal court had sentenced him to a 11-year jail-term in a second money-laundering case after the Supreme Court had acquitted him in the first of three – with one more still in the trial stage – Yameen had sought of made his loyalists and even adversaries believe that he had a magic potion that would qualify him to contest the presidential poll. That it was not to become clear only when four mutually-antagonistic EC members (with one vacancy) threw out his nomination papers first, followed by an equally unanimous decision by all seven judges of the Supreme Court, upholding the EC ruling.

It did not end there, though as Team Yameen spoke about a ‘Plan B’ to name an alternate PPM candidate and a ‘Plan-C’ to elect a PNC candidate for a ‘worst case scenario’ – all of it hours before and after the SC had thrown out his petition. Earlier, the SC registry itself threw out two of PPM’s petitions, seeking to ‘restore Yameen’s rights’, possibly for absence of locus standi. It is anybody’s guess why Yameen’s legal defence did not seek to stay the conviction pending the appeal hearing in the High Court.

Nor is it known why as the prospective presidential candidate of the nation’s second largest party – a fact that they lost no occasion to stress – Yameen did not move the Supreme Court, seeking a different Bench or an order after two of the three High Court judges hearing his case successively went on ‘family leave’, closer to the EC opening the presidential nominations. Now, his defence team has been told that the High Court would recommence the case this week itself. The technical question thus remains what if the HC acquits him in the second case, now that the trial in the third case is taking its time, even otherwise.

But Yameen’s real problem was with his sticking to the ‘boycott call’ in his absence. Clearly under-estimating the forces that were at work within his coalition, Yameen first asked the PNC to select a ‘reserve candidate’, if that is the term, and insisted on the party doing so after they had played the ball back to him. This time round, the PNC not only decided to field a candidate but also chose Muizzu through an open contest involving another senior leader.

Yameen had been clearly out-witted as he had seemingly known that the sand under his feet had shifted. Together, the two parties rebuffed his insistence for a boycott. Later, they patched up, Yameen endorsed Muizzu, and the leaderships of the two parties too have done so. But the damage had been done. One, Yameen got himself painted as the ‘selfish man’ that critics had claimed him to be. His half-hearted endorsement of Muizzu has confused his voters, who to the man are all his personal loyalists, too. There is also the pro-Yameen constituency that has problems voting for a candidate endorsed by religious extremists.

Common candidate

Candidates other than Solih have yet to launch their campaign. Even JP’s Gasim Ibrahim and MNP’s Nazim had made only a half-hearted attempt in the early rounds, as they were in constant confabulations between themselves, and also other non-MDP, anti-Solih parties wanting to form one or another coalition, if not field a common candidate. Possibly hoping that Yameen would be able to contest, the PPM-PNC combine had all along claimed that if there was to be a common candidate, it had to be theirs.

The fact that every other party had fielded its own nominee means that they did not accept even Yameen as a common candidate. The question of their pitching for Muizzu or any other from among those in the fray does not arise. Yet, Nasheed, in an early campaign speech, has urged Yameen’s PPM not to create a situation in which his party men are forced to vote for the MDP (meaning Solih) in the second round.

Among his causes for concerns should be the PPM-PNC’s off-again-on-again ‘India Out’ campaign, after one of which ‘The Democrats’ declared that it would then be difficult for the party to negotiate a coalition with the Yameen camp. It is another matter that neither India, nor ‘India Out’ seemed to have been among the causes for the two camps coming together.

For, there is the real danger of ‘The Democrats’ losing more votes to the MDP parent if identified with the Yameen camp. It would then be similar to the way Gayoom lost all his traditional votes to estranged half-brother Yameen, in 2018 after he had joined hands with the MDP rival from the previous decade and more, for Solih to take on the incumbent of the time.

The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst & political commentator. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.

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