Editor’s Note: This article was written prior to the occurrence of the Maldives presidential election, which before this piece was published, had occurred. Official results have announced that President-Elect Mohamed Muizzu has won the election by 54% of the vote and is scheduled to be inaugurated on November 17th, 2023. 

An important referendum is coming up. It's not one you will hear about much unless you pay a lot of attention to current affairs. It isn’t taking place in America, nor anywhere else in the developed world. It isn’t a referendum on a policy, or a plan, or a budget, or a law. It isn’t even technically a codified referendum. It is a referendum that will decide the fate of the entire region, with important shipping routes and spheres of influence at stake. It is a referendum that will decide the balance of power in the region between two of the world’s largest and most influential superpowers over the world’s third largest body of water.

Despite its gravity, this referendum only has around 31,000 eligible voters. And it is all set against the backdrop of the world’s premier vacation spot, the Republic of Maldives. 

The Maldives is about to have an election on the 30th of September 2023. The two competing candidates were selected from a previous round held earlier this month, on the 9th of September. Like other elections that we have covered, the Maldives employs a two stage runoff system to elect a President. If no candidate can achieve a 50% majority approval rating in the first round, then a second runoff election round is held shortly thereafter, with the two candidates that received the largest share of the vote squaring off in a two man race for the nation’s top job. 

The Maldives is a Presidential Republic just like the United States, so the President has an immense amount of influence over Maldivian politics. The President gets to appoint and lead the cabinet, hold referendums on issues of national importance, direct the Maldives’ foreign affairs, and enter into treaties with other nations. 

The two candidates that gained the largest percentages of the pre-runoff vote are incumbent President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, and Mohamed Muizzu, who is currently the mayor of Malé (the largest city in the Maldives). Muizzu took a surprisingly large 46% of the vote, and President Solih took only 39% of the vote. 

These two men represent the two largest coalitions in Maldivian politics. President Solih is a member of the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), a party founded by Maldivian exiles in Sri Lanka that was critical in toppling the 30 year dictatorship of former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Muizzu belongs to the opposition Progressive Party of the Maldives (PPM) which frequently heads an ever shifting coalition of opposition parties to the MDP within the country. The PPM is usually also allied with an ever changing cast of other smaller parties in opposition to the MDP. Both parties fall on the right of the aisle, as the Maldives is a deeply conservative nation, but they represent ideological differences within Maldivian conservatism. The MDP represents historically a more Liberal-Conservative ideology, espousing agendas of economic freedom and austerity. However, the PPM represents a more socially conservative ideology as well as moderate political Islamism.

The circumstances of how Ibrahim Mohamed Solih acquired power are also worth examining. Solih acquired power in 2018 on a wave of popularity after the fall of President Abdullah Yameen (a PPM member), an autocrat who used extensive libel and terrorism laws to imprison his political opposition. In the previous election in 2013, he had used the judiciary to nullify an election and postpone a rerun. He was also immensely corrupt, an offense for which he would later be imprisoned. Solih gained over 58% of the vote on a 90% turnout, a resounding result in his favor. There was quite a lot of anxiety about whether or not Yameen would accept the results or potentially execute a military coup, but democratic norms prevailed and Yameen admitted defeat.

However, the internal domestic machinations of the Maldives are not why many observers in the international community have turned their attention towards the small island nation. What is far more interesting to outsiders is the foreign policy commitments of these parties. 

The MDP and specifically President Solih have always been staunch allies of India. President Solih managed Maldivian international relations on one principle: “India First”. Solih went to great lengths to prioritize India over China and make it clear that India was the preferred international partner for the small island nation. Solih has made several moves to move closer to India. Since he came to power in 2019, the Indian government has agreed to sell at least 30 new military vehicles to the Maldives, engaged in 8 new military exercises, and helped construct 3 new installations for the Maldivian military: a training outpost, a series of monitoring posts, and perhaps its biggest project, Ekatha harbor. 

Ekatha Harbor is to be an Indian built and developed dockyard and military installation on the island of Uthuruthilafalhu (UTF) which it will help build and then develop and maintain for a period of 15 years. Despite this being called a harbor, it has all the features of a military base. It will improve the capacity of the Maldivian Coast Guard to operate. The agreement signed by the Maldivian government allows Indian troops to carry firearms by the island, stoking some local concerns that it may be used as a military base. 

Solih also negotiated a deal for a $100 Million USD line of credit from India to construct infrastructure, and agreed to provide funding for the Greater Malé connectivity project, a bridge designed to help better connect the Malé metro area. Under Solih, India also received hundreds of thousands of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine from India as a gift. 

However, the PPM has taken a very different approach towards international relations. Under the government of former President Yameen (the President prior to Solih), the nation moved closer to China in foreign policy. Yameen brought the Maldives into China’s Belt and Road Initiative as part of its “string of pearls” strategy in the Indo-Pacific region. Prior to Yameen taking power, China did not even have an embassy in the Maldives- but afterward, China began rapidly increasing its role in the Maldives. Yameen greenlighted an $830 Million USD upgrade of Velana International Airport, near the capital. China is also reportedly building a housing complex and a hospital in the Maldives as well. Reportedly, during Yameen’s regime, payments to China rose to a whopping 10% of the Maldives’ total government budget, leading many to fear that China is scheduling a similar type of debt-trap diplomacy as was deployed against Sri Lanka earlier. By the end of Yameen’s tenure, the Maldives had borrowed $1.5 Billion USD from China.

After Yameen lost his election, Solih began the aforementioned reorientation towards India. But the PPM didn’t stay quiet on the issue, even after the conviction of Yameen on corruption charges and subsequent prison sentence. In October 2020, the PPM and fellow coalition partner the People’s National Congress (PNC) launched the India Out protest movement, a campaign aimed at derailing Indian influence in the region. The movement has launched several demonstrations. This has taken several forms, including a quite xenophobic turn online towards Indian nationals in the Maldives, blaming them for increases in crime and for being agents of India. The main demand of this movement that has manifested in national politics is Mohamed Muizzu’s promise to end all bilateral defense cooperation with India, with his campaign manager stating that expelling all Indian personnel stationed in the Maldives is “non-negotiable”.

To say that the India Out movement is entirely wrong and has zero legitimate causes is wrong. India does have 70 unarmed military personnel stationed within the country, and towards the end of Yameen’s regime it appeared as though India may have been preparing to step in as it refused to withdraw its troops and the helicopters it had stationed there out of the time from the country when Yameen asked it to. There was also a fair bit of controversy regarding former President Mohamed Nasheed (Yameen’s predecessor and a member of the MDP), who had made a deal with an Indian corporation to upgrade the airport. This corporation got itself into legal trouble regarding placing a development fee on Maldivian nationals, which caused a great deal of backlash. 

But the way it has manifested itself has been less than kind. Some aspects of the India Out movement have been endorsed by religious zealots and hardliners, using xenophobic and anti-Indian/anti-Hindu rhetoric. 

This back and forth competition between India and China is how most observers have viewed this election, with Solih framed as the pro-India option and Muizzu as the pro-China option. The Maldives is a legitimately important piece of the geopolitical puzzle that the Indian Ocean region is composed of. It sits along some of the world’s most important trade routes and controlling access to those trade routes could benefit a nation’s economy and hurt that of its enemies- as well as produce a tidy sum for whoever helps construct the port infrastructure that the Maldives requires to remain globally relevant. 

The first round of election results were seen as somewhat of an upset from previous predictions. Political scientists and poll-watchers largely predicted a resounding victory for the incumbent Solih, while the real results came up not only with Solih not winning an outright majority, but coming in second place to Muizz. 

Solih does not face only one challenger- 8 separate candidates contested the first round of the Presidential election- including a new party, the Democrats. The Democrats is a breakaway faction of the MDP formed by the aforementioned ex-President Mohamed Nasheed. Nasheed, who is currently speaker of the People’s Majlis (the legislative body of the Maldives), suffered a defeat earlier this year in the MDP primary, where Mohamed Solih won a resounding victory to be the Presidential nominee of the MDP. 

Nasheed, who felt betrayed by this event, created a new party known as The Democrats, and defected along with several former MDP members of the Majlis. The party nominee for the Presidency was Ilyas Labeeb, a young charismatic former MDP MP who was the youngest party nominee to run for President in the history of the Maldives at just 44 years old. There was the possibility of a political shakeup due to Labeeb’s candidacy, with 57% of young voters saying he brings a “new energy” to Maldivian politics. 

Labeeb came in third, at a small but significant 7.8% of the vote. This may have contributed to a loss of support from Solih due to young voters defecting to support Labeeb. Whether or not these young voters will now transfer back to Solih now that Labeeb is out of the race is yet to be seen. 

Although watched keenly by outsiders, it is expected that the election will not be decided by grand geopolitical questions of India or China alignment, but rather by home and domestic issues. President Solih has also faced recent criticism due to his handling of corruption allegations, combined with the fact that a defection in his party makes him appear to be a weak leader. However, his new and recently unveiled pioneering housing policy would grant thousands of land plots to residents of Malé, which is currently experiencing an acute housing crisis. His infrastructure projects across the Maldives have also bought him significant capital with voters. 

Recent polls in the Maldives show Solih slightly edging out Muizzu with a 6 point lead- but the high number of undecided voters (north of 30% of those surveyed) mean the outcome of the election is far from certain. Even if Muizzu does win, for the first year of his Presidency he will face a dire uphill climb with a congress dominated by the MDP- although whispers circling about a possible alliance with Labeeb’s Democrats may give him more leverage in parliament. Only time will tell what the people of the Maldives will choose.