Maldives president concedes loss
Nation exhales as challenger prevails
MALÉ, Maldives — The Maldives’ Elections Commission on Monday declared a resounding presidential election victory for the opposition candidate, and after hours of tense waiting, the country’s authoritarian incumbent conceded defeat.
The opposition candidate, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, won more than 58 percent of the ballots cast in an election that saw almost a 90 percent turnout among eligible voters, according to the Elections Commission’s Twitter account.
But in a country with a brief but painful history of derailed democracy, the silence by President Abdulla Yameen, stretching for hours after Sunday night, had left many worried. The Supreme Court annulled a previous presidential election, and Mr. Yameen has put pressure on the judiciary to jail opponents in the past.
Mr. Yameen finally conceded defeat Monday afternoon at a news conference. “Yesterday, the Maldivian people decided what they want,” Mr. Yameen said. “I have accepted the results since yesterday. Earlier today, I met with Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, whom the Maldivian people have chosen to be their next president, and I congratulated him.”
While the opposition painted Sunday’s election as a final stand to preserve the Maldives’ nascent democracy — just a decade old — the vote was also seen as a critical referendum at a time when the archipelago nation has been caught between the influence of China, on one hand, and India and the West on the other.
The islands of the Maldives divide the Indian Ocean from the Arabian Sea, sitting along global maritime trade routes that are crucial to China’s ambitions to expand its own naval and commercial routes. China has spent up to $2 billion on infrastructure and other projects in the Maldives; the opposition and Western and Indian diplomats have warned that a growing dependence on China could be a threat to the Maldives’ sovereignty.
But Mr. Solih’s win will probably not roll back Chinese influence here. India and the United States have been unable to match China’s spending across South Asia as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, which Beijing says will secure commercial interests but which skeptics say will also expand its global military footprint.
Instead, Mr. Solih has signaled that he will try to hedge between global powers and restore the warm ties the country once shared with India, which has watched China’s rise in the region with concern. In the past, the opposition leader has promised to strengthen relations with neighboring countries to preserve security in the Indian Ocean.
Mr. Solih pledged this month to restore democratic freedoms if he clinched victory, including rolling back the anti-defamation act that Mr. Yameen introduced as a tool for locking up opponents. Mr. Solih also promised to investigate the 2014 disappearance of Ahmed Rilwan Abdulla, a prominent journalist critical of the governing party.
On Sunday, voters turned out in vast numbers, forming long lines requiring hours of wait time.
The streets of Malé, the capital island, were adorned with flags and banners of pink and yellow, the colors of the governing and opposition parties. The election had an almost carnival-like atmosphere, with voters exiting polling sites to take selfies and posing for pictures showing their fingers dipped in ink.
“I think we are still voting for freedom, to get freedom,” said Hussain Rasheed, a 53year-old diver, as he proudly displayed a finger stained with voting ink outside a polling center. “We can’t get justice without freedom. In hundreds of years of this country, we haven’t really got justice.”
But the nation held its breath on Monday, waiting for Mr. Yameen to concede defeat. In the 2013 presidential election, the Supreme Court stepped in to annul the first round and then delayed later rounds.