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The opposition candidate defeated 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 vote, preliminary outcomes confirmed.
Progressive Occasion of Maldives (PPM) candidate Muizzu soundly defeated incumbent President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih of the Maldivian Democratic Occasion (MDP) and will probably be sworn in on November 17.
The president-elect is extensively seen as sympathetic to Chinese language pursuits within the nation, and fewer favorable to India, the Maldives’ big neighbor 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 demonstrated a peaceable and democratic course of.”
The end result undermines Solih’s efforts to return the nation’s diplomatic posture to New Delhi since he took workplace 5 years in the past.
Who’s Muizzu?
A British-trained civil engineer, Muizzu, 45, is the present mayor of Male, the nation’s capital.
He was an unlikely candidate for president after serving as Building Minister in his mentor Abdulla Yameen’s authorities.
However Yameen’s jailing on corruption fees – which his celebration says had been politically motivated – ensured Muizzu would lead the celebration as his proxy in elections that can name into query the strategically positioned nation’s ties with China and India got here.
As minister underneath Yameen, Muizzu oversaw a number of Chinese language-funded infrastructure tasks within the nation of lower than 1,000,000 folks, together with a $200 million bridge connecting the capital to the archipelago’s important airport.
Final yr, he instructed Chinese language Communist Occasion officers at a web-based assembly that his celebration’s return to workplace would strengthen “robust ties between our two nations.”
Al Jazeera’s Tony Cheng, reporting from Male, mentioned Muizzu might discover it tough to ship on all the guarantees he made throughout his marketing campaign.
“India is deeply concerned in finance, in commerce and in infrastructure development. I feel it might be very tough, even when he wished to, to cease that. He has publicly mentioned he’s in favor of China,” Cheng mentioned.
“China has been very closely concerned in financing a lot of the infrastructure development. However there are additionally issues because the Maldives has a really important debt to China, a few of which is due inside a number of years,” he added.
Muizzu’s electoral success relied on a sustained marketing campaign in opposition to India’s extreme political and financial energy within the Maldives.
New Delhi has a historical past of entanglements with instances within the Maldives, together with deploying troopers to thwart a 1988 coup try. Its affect has been a periodic supply of resentment within the Muslim-majority nation.
The Maldives are positioned in a strategically very important place in the course of the Indian Ocean, straddling one of many busiest east-west transport lanes on the earth.
Solih was elected in 2018 over his dissatisfaction 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 – and accused him of pushing the nation right into a Chinese language debt entice.
Yameen’s flip to Beijing had additionally alarmed New Delhi, which like the US and its allies shares considerations about China’s rising assertiveness within the Indian Ocean.
India is a member of the strategic Quad alliance alongside the US, Australia and Japan.
Who’s Mohamed Muizzu, the pro-China President-elect of the Maldives? | Political information
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