The opposition candidate beats the incumbent, President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, who is taken into account pro-India.
Voters within the Indian Ocean archipelago of Maldives on Saturday elected opposition chief Mohamed Muizzu because the nation’s president, giving him 54 % of the votes, in line with preliminary outcomes.
Muizzu, candidate for the Progressive Celebration of Maldives (PPM), roundly defeated incumbent President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih of the Maldivian Democratic Celebration (MDP) and is ready to be sworn in on November 17.
The president-elect is broadly seen as sympathetic to China’s pursuits within the nation, and fewer favourably disposed in direction of India, Maldives’s big neighbour and conventional safety and financial companion.
Solih, who’s seen as pro-India, accepted the outcomes.
“Congratulations to president-elect Muizzu,” Solih wrote on X, previously Twitter. “I additionally congratulate the individuals who have proven a peaceable and democratic course of.”
The consequence upends Solih’s efforts to revert the nation’s diplomatic posture again in direction of New Delhi since taking workplace 5 years in the past.
Who’s Muizzu?
A British-educated civil engineer, Muizzu, 45, is the present mayor of Male, the nation’s capital.
He was an unlikely candidate for the presidency after serving as building minister within the authorities of his mentor Abdulla Yameen.
However Yameen’s jailing on corruption fees — which his occasion says had been politically motivated — noticed Muizzu tapped to guide the occasion as his proxy in an election the place the strategically positioned nation’s ties with China and India had been on the poll.
As minister underneath Yameen, Muizzu oversaw a number of Chinese language-funded infrastructure initiatives within the nation of lower than a million folks, together with a $200m bridge linking the capital with the archipelago’s important airport.
He informed Chinese language Communist Celebration officers throughout a web based assembly final 12 months that his occasion’s return to workplace would develop the “sturdy ties between our two international locations”.
Al Jazeera’s Tony Cheng, reporting from Male, mentioned Muizzu would possibly discover it exhausting to fulfil all the guarantees he made throughout campaigning.
“India is deeply concerned enmeshed within the funds, in commerce, in infrastructure development. I feel will probably be very exhausting, even when he needed to, to cease that. He has publicly mentioned he favours China,” Cheng mentioned.
“China has been very deeply concerned in financing a whole lot of infrastructure development. However there are issues there too in that Maldives has a really appreciable debt owed to China, a few of that are due in a few years,” he added.
Muizzu’s election success hinged on a sustained marketing campaign in opposition to India’s outsized political and financial clout within the Maldives.
New Delhi has a historical past of entanglements with affairs in Maldives, together with the deployment of troopers to thwart a 1988 coup try. Its affect has been a periodic supply of resentment within the Muslim-majority nation.
The Maldives sits in a strategically important place in the course of the Indian Ocean, astride one of many world’s busiest east-west transport lanes.
Solih was elected in 2018 on the again of discontent with Yameen’s more and more controversial rule — many political opponents had been locked up in the identical jail the place the previous president is now behind bars — accusing him of pushing the nation right into a Chinese language debt lure.
Yameen’s flip in direction of Beijing had additionally alarmed New Delhi, which shares considerations with the USA and its allies about China’s rising assertiveness within the Indian Ocean.
India is a member of the strategic Quad alliance alongside the US, Australia and Japan.
