Maldivians yesterday voted in a parliamentary election likely to test Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu’s tilt toward China and away from India, the luxury tourism hot spot’s traditional benefactor.
Among the first to vote was Muizzu, 45, who cast his ballot at the Tajuddin school in the capital, Male.
Maldivian Elections Commission Chairman Fuad Thaufeeq urged the 284,663 eligible voters to cast their ballots early.
Photo: AFP
Polling stations across the archipelago would be open for nine-and-a-half hours.
Primarily known as one of the most expensive holiday destinations in South Asia, with pristine white beaches and secluded resorts, the atoll nation has also become a geopolitical hot spot in the Indian Ocean.
Global east-west shipping lanes pass the nation’s chain of 1,192 tiny coral islands, which stretch about 800km across the equator.
Muizzu won the presidential poll in September last year as a proxy for pro-China ex-president Abdulla Yameen, freed last week after a court set aside his 11-year jail term for corruption.
This month, as campaigning for the parliamentary elections was in full swing, Muizzu awarded high-profile infrastructure contracts to Chinese state-owned companies.
His administration is also in the process of sending home a garrison of 89 Indian troops who operate reconnaissance aircraft gifted by New Delhi to patrol the Maldives’ vast maritime borders.
The current parliament, dominated by the pro-India Maldivian Democratic Party of Muizzu’s immediate predecessor Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, has sought to stymie his efforts to realign the archipelago’s diplomacy.
“Geopolitics is very much in the background as parties campaign for votes in Sunday’s election,” a senior aide of Muizzu said, asking not to be named. “He came to power on a promise to send back Indian troops and he is working on it. The parliament has not been cooperating with him since he came to power.”
Since Muizzu came to office, lawmakers have blocked three of his nominees to the Cabinet and refused some of his spending proposals.
Splits in all the main political parties, including Muizzu’s People’s National Congress party, are expected to make it hard for any single party to win an outright majority.
However, Muizzu’s prospects received a fillip with the release of his mentor Yameen from house arrest on Thursday.
A court in the capital ordered a retrial in the graft and money laundering cases that sent Yameen to prison after he lost a re-election bid in 2018.
Yameen had also backed closer alignment with Beijing while in power, but his conviction left him unable to contest last year’s presidential poll himself.
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,
AIRLINES RECOVERING: Two-thirds of the flights canceled on Saturday due to the faulty CrowdStrike update that hit 8.5 million devices worldwide occurred in the US As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage. “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant