‘Absolute power’: After pro-China Maldives leader’s big win, what’s next?

The parliamentary polls sweep by Muizzu’s party raises fears of a return to ‘tyranny’ and questions whether Beijing will step in to alleviate Maldives’s economic woes.

Very few expected Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu’s party to win Sunday’s parliamentary elections, that too by a landslide. For this was a man whose triumph in the presidential poll last year came by a fluke.

Back then, the 45-year-old mayor of the capital Male entered the presidential race only at the eleventh hour as a proxy candidate, after the country’s Supreme Court barred the leader of the opposition, former President Abdulla Yameen, from contesting the vote over a bribery conviction.

On campaign banners and posters, it was Yameen’s face that featured most prominently. And at campaign rallies, the seat at the front and centre stood empty, reserved for the jailed leader.

Muizzu wooed voters on promises to free Yameen and see through the politician’s “India out” campaign to end what they called New Delhi’s outsized influence in Maldives – an archipelago home to 500,000 people in the Indian Ocean – and expel Indian military personnel stationed there.

But soon after his election win in October, Muizzu and Yameen – who was moved to house arrest – fell out, prompting the president-elect to set up a separate party, the People’s National Congress (PNC). Amid the bitter split, it looked as if Muizzu would face an uphill battle to obtain enough support in Sunday’s parliamentary polls, especially as the opposition Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) – which controls a supermajority in the outgoing parliament or Majlis – still appeared strong.