The Maldives goes to the polls: Yellow fever

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

SIPPING beer and staring at the ocean, tourists on Addu atoll at the southern tip of the Maldives usually ponder weighty questions such as whether to strap on a snorkel or sunbathe on the pristine beaches. An alternative exists: a political safari on the equatorial islands that bob up from the Indian Ocean.

On the island of Gan, once home to a British military base, the police station is a blackened mess of glass and twisted pipes. Drive on beyond coconut trees and moored yachts and you find the burned wreck of a courthouse. Like other smashed official buildings, it is daubed with abusive graffiti.

Rioters struck in February last year, furious at the ousting of the country’s first directly elected president, Mohamed Nasheed. He, not unreasonably, called it a coup, having resigned under threat of violence. His immediate sin was ordering the arrest of a judge close to politically powerful families.

A new democracy, born with a fresh constitution in 2008, seemed about to die. Yet the evidence from the Maldives, where politicians campaign by speedboat, is that it struggles gamely on. Those who forced Mr Nasheed’s resignation have honoured the constitution and announced they are sticking to the timetable for presidential polls on September 7th, when voters will get a second chance. Parliamentary elections follow next year.

Rocking on a garden swing among coral houses on Addu, the slim ex-president is sure he will soon be back in office. “Statistics and the smiles of the people” suggest victory, he says. His Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) says it has identified that over half the 240,000 registered voters will back him.

Mr Nasheed’s overthrow and subsequent harassment appear to have boosted his popularity. Foreign pressure kept him out of jail. As speakers blare out his party tunes, he says: “Somehow the country rose up in yellow,” his party colour. Voters perhaps also credit him for new pensions, social housing and cheaper health care brought in while he was in office.

It helps that his core supporters, the young, predominate among the population of 350,000: the median age is just 26. Politics is fiercely and widely debated on social media, where the MDP is adept. His party, advised by Britain’s Conservatives, looks professional. Recent local elections suggest strength in a heavily urban population: in Male, the crowded capital, and Addu, the emerging second city.

His three rivals, by contrast, rely more on votes corralled by chiefs on outlying atolls, mainly from the older and less educated. One is rumoured to seek votes by dishing out cash, air-conditioners and other goodies. They point to problems with Mr Nasheed, some accurate: impetuosity, immaturity, and a charge of being India’s stooge. Islamic conservatives—the sort eager to flog teenage girls accused of sex before marriage—call him immoral, saying he promotes alcohol.

The rivals’ main hope is to force Mr Nasheed into a run-off election later in September, then unite against him. If they do, the future winner is unlikely to be the affable current president, Mohamed Waheed, who on August 28th claimed that last year’s turmoil was merely the “growing pains of democracy”. Rather, it will probably be one of a pair of wilier old campaigners. The first is Abdullah Yameen, a half-brother of the former dictator, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. The other is Qasim Ibrahim, a resort tycoon with deep pockets.

It matters who wins. For three decades until 2008 the country was run by Mr Gayoom, an autocratic moderniser who made the Maldives the wealthiest corner of South Asia by promoting high-end bikini-and-booze tourism (usually on atolls some distance away from the solidly Muslim local population). He also crushed dissent, let capricious and poorly educated judges make a mockery of the law, and allowed social problems to fester, notably widespread heroin addiction.

Getting from autocracy to democratic stability is a difficult task. Economic clashes do not help. In effect, it was Mr Gayoom’s frontmen who pushed out Mr Nasheed last year and have since been running things. One theory is that they were pushed into desperate action because they hated Mr Nasheed’s decision to let a big Indian investor, GMR, rebuild and run the airport in Male, a lucrative business. The firm was kicked out shortly after Mr Nasheed, infuriating India.

Now Mr Nasheed promises, if he wins, to bring the Indian firm back. That would smooth matters with India again. GMR, meanwhile, is demanding an astonishing $1.4 billion in compensation, just in case. Economic stability, regional relations and democracy are all up for grabs on September 7th. Who has time for snorkelling?

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