New Delhi: The booming fireworks at the Muizzu government’s gathering in Malé on Monday night were a stark symbol of their unprecedented win in the parliamentary elections, drawing attention to a shifting political landscape in the Indian Ocean island nation that has implications for regional power politics.
Six months after Mohamed Muizzu was ushered in as the president, Maldivians again went to the polls on Sunday and decided to hand a massive majority in parliament to the ruling coalition.
Muizzu’s People’s National Congress (PNC) alone bagged 66 seats out of the 93 seats of the Majlis. Along with other allies and independents, he got 74 seats, which is more than three-fourths of the seats in the parliament.
While Maldives has a presidential system, the parliament is the main legislative body and has several constitutional powers designed to act as a check on the president’s decisions and actions.
Under Muizzu, the close ties with India have been fractured in the last six months, with the new president repeating the mantra of strategic autonomy, while China steps up its activities in the archipelago.
With its strategic position on the Indian Ocean, the outcome of the Maldives parliamentary election in strengthening Muizzu’s hand is being followed closely not only in New Delhi, but in key world capitals.
Here is The Wire’s explainer to understand the underlying reasons for Muizzu’s victory and what it means for India-Maldives ties.
Did the scale of the electoral landslide win come as a surprise?
In the 2019 parliamentary elections, the Maldivian Democratic Party secured 65 seats, marking the first time that any political group had got a majority in the Majlis since the advent of multi-party elections. From 65, the MDP’s seat count has slumped to just 12 this year.
In fact, the PNC, which fielded candidates on behalf of the ruling PPM-PNC coalition, surpassed the MDP’s 2019 tally by one seat. When combined with the four seats won by three allied parties and the support of four independents, the ruling coalition now holds a commanding ‘super majority’ of 73 seats in the 93-member parliament.
The consensus of most observers of Maldivian politics was that the scale of the verdict was surprising.
Leading up to the elections, Muizzu, witnessing contradictions within his party, had endorsed several candidates who stood as independents after having failed to secure ticket in the PNC party primaries.
Further, he was battling alone compared to the presidential elections. Soon after the presidential polls, former President Abdulla Yameen fell out with Muizzu and formed his own party, PNF. He was released just a few days before the elections by the High Court, but PNF failed to secure a single seat.
Former Maldivian foreign minister and human rights lawyer Ahmed Shaheed said that the results were “very unexpected”. “The people that I have spoken to were saying that they expected the government to pick up a significant number of seats, but nobody was projecting this result,” he stated.
According to former Maldivian ambassador to India Ahmed Mohamed, even the government may have been surprised by the win. “The best estimates I heard from the grapevine was the government were expecting around 50 (seats),” he said.
What factors led Maldivian voters to grant such a massive majority to Muizzu?
Veteran Indian watcher of Maldives N. Sathiyamoorthy believes that it was te MDP’s “parliamentary antics which turned the people against them”.
The MDP-dominated parliament had put obstacles in endorsing appointments for ambassadors and ministers.
“They openly talked about impeachment and even passed a resolution to cut down the effective strength of Parliament minus those that have become ministers, to this end. The SC threw out the resolution,” he recalled.
Concerned with over a dozen lawmakers crossing over to government benches, the MDP also passed an anti-defection law, even though the party had been instrumental in repealing a similar legislation in 2018. Muizzu ratified the diluted anti-defection act less than a week before the elections.
Shaheed also agreed that the behaviour after Muizzu’s election weighed heavily on voters’ mind.
“It became quite apparent to people that they had had chosen a government and they would need a parliament that helps the government to do what they want to do. If they believe in Muizzu as a person and chose him to be president, that hasn’t gone way in the last five months,” said Shaheed.
He also pointed to the “internal bickering” of the MDP, with former President Mohamed Nasheed leaving last year to form a new party, The Democrats, which didn’t win a single parliamentary seat.
“Nasheed’s departure not only outed the ideology of the party, he decimated himself. So, they both ruined themselves,” he said.
Further, the MDP’s image as having squandered its opportunities – its majority in parliament and in government over the last five years – has been set now, added Shaheed.
He also noted that the MDP had many lawmakers with multiple terms, who seemed to have “lost touch with the people” and were perceived as “arrogant and profiteering”.
“I believe it is more of a negative vote on the MDP rather than a positive vote for Muizzu,” asserted Shaheed.
As per Ahmed Mohamed, the results have followed the “the historical trend of the past two elections”, where the winner of the presidential election also performed well in the subsequent parliamentary polls a few months later.
The exception was the first multi-party parliamentary election in 2009, when the MDP led by President Mohamed Nasheed got less seats than Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s DRP. “You know well the challenges that the then government faced and ultimately, he (Nasheed) had to resign.”
“So maybe the collective view among the public is that whoever is in the government should have an upper hand in the parliament, otherwise things will be stagnant,” said Mohamed, who had been appointed as envoy to India under the Yameen administration.
Is this a new phase in Maldivian politics?
The defeat of the MDP, along with the zero seats garnered by the parties of Nasheed and Yameen, seem portentous to several observers.
Ahmed Shaheed said that it would be “right to say that it is turning a new corner, entering a new phase in Maldivian politics”.
He felt that the progressives have failed to live up to their ideals, with no clear or consistent vision. “That generation of politicians in opposition who had worked for reforms have been sidelined.”
Sathiyamoorthy also underlined that there has been a major shift. “Plain and simple, politics has moved away from the pro-democracy generation to the next.”
He said that Yameen and Nasheed had both been washed away, and that the MDP would now have to struggle, suggesting they could start by resolving their internal contradictions.
“Muizzu was not a part of it all when it all happened through two decades, from 1990s.”
However, Mohamed is not that confident that the election results could be a reflection that the age of the old stalwarts is now gone.
“That’s a very difficult assessment probably. President Yameen was able to come out free from his sentence just a day before the election. So he would not have been able to make such an impact. On the other hand, Nasheed was away from Maldives. So, the only players that physically attending to all day-to-day campaign was the government and the MDP,” he said.
Is this verdict an endorsement of his foreign policy and how he deals with India?
In his victory speech on Monday night, Muizzu said that the results showed to the international community that Maldivians “want to decide our own matters by ourselves”.
Even in some of his campaign pitches during the run-up to the parliamentary polls, he had accused the opposition of being led by unnamed foreign ambassadors. The finger was obviously pointed towards India, which had a very close relationship with the earlier MDP government under Ibrahim Solih.
Muizzu’s 2023 presidential campaign gained traction through the ‘India Out’ movement, advocating for the withdrawal of Indian troops from Maldives who were stationed to operate three aircraft for humanitarian purposes.
After six months in the job, he returned on the campaign path for the parliamentary elections, having successfully managed to fulfil his earlier promise and secured the departure of Indian soldiers from Maldives.
He mentioned the withdrawal of Indian troops in many of his rally speeches, often describing the opposition as inimical to the sovereignty of Maldives.
However, former high commissioner Ahmed Mohamed, who had occupied key public offices after being a senior member of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s DRP party, asserted that the Maldivian electorate did not vote on foreign policy issues in the parliamentary elections.
“The average number of eligible voters in a constituency is around 2,000. For them, voting is based on personal connection, family ties and whether they can get direct benefits. This is not a mandate for foreign policy,” he said.
Ahmed Shaheed, who was foreign minister under both Gayoom and Nasheed administrations, also asserted that the constituencies are so small that they are fought on local issues. In contrast, during the presidential elections, the entire nation becomes in essence one constituency.
“What matters for the voter is the personal connection, will the person be accessible after the elections to remain in touch with us. I think foreign policy has nothing to do with this,” he said.
Concurring, Sathiyamoorthy also stated that Muizzu can behave “whichever way he chooses and pass it as part as party of the mandate”, but that the voter in the parliamentary election does not care about the ‘India’ factor. “They voted on domestic issues, or at least a majority of them did”.
What’s now in store for India-Maldives relations?
The veteran Chennai-based commentator said he is hopeful that now that Muizzu had asserted his electoral supremacy especially against Yameen, he will “revisit” his India policy.
India, he said, had to give Muizzu some space and then begin working with him, “starting with relatively minor issues and India-funded projects, which is what the core group meetings have been addressing, anyway”.
Shaheed felt that the “kind of personal approach that the previous government had will not happen”. However, the “underlying structural closeness” of India and Maldives will prevail, he added.
“There is enough recognition in foreign office of Maldives and hopefully in Delhi that these two countries need to work together,” he noted.
