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NEW DELHI – As people voted Sunday on the sidelines of the island known as the Maldives, their unstable democracy was confronted with the crushing of a geopolitical struggle between China, India and Japan. West.
The autocratic president, Abdulla Yameen, hopes to consolidate his grip with a second term, the opposition warns that the nascent democracy of the Maldives is at stake and that the accusations of fraud have weighed on both sides. The polls opened last Sunday, suggesting a high turnout on the streets of the Maldives and in countries where there are many Maldivian communities, such as Sri Lanka.
Located in south-west India and crossing crucial maritime routes for China, the Maldives have been caught in recent years by Beijing's growing global ambitions, which the United States and its allies have struggled to contain.
China has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure projects in the Maldives, which critics, including the political opposition, warn of a "debt trap diplomacy" that weighs on the recipient country to get a naval base as a refund. The governments of both countries reject this assessment.
Even before Sunday's election, Yameen was accused of faking them, forcing state-owned companies to vote for his party, stacking the electoral commission with loyalists, locking opposition leaders, and canceling registration. voters.
On Saturday night, police raided the opposition office in Male, citing evidence of vote buying. This month, the police said they had unveiled a plot to "create the false impression that the elections would not be free and fair," according to Western diplomats, who could be used to cancel the elections if the ruling party does not not win.
"There is very little confidence in the electoral process," said Aiman Rasheed, program manager for Transparency Maldives, an anti-corruption organization. "People feel that their votes do not matter."
The United States said this month that it would impose sanctions on the Maldivian authorities if the elections were not free and fair. But the European Union and the United States have refused to send teams to monitor the vote, fearing to appear to tolerate them.
The election pitted the Progressive Party against Yameen against a unified opposition led by Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, a legislator of the Maldivian Democratic Party. The Maldives became a democracy in 2008, during the first vote to directly elect a president.
Yameen came to power in 2013 after elections attended by more than 100 international observers. Since then, he has imprisoned his political opponents, including his half-brother, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who led the country for 30 years until its opening in 2008, and Muhammed Nasheed, the first democratically elected president.
The opposition rallied to Mr. Solih after many opposition leaders, including Mr. Nasheed, went into exile.
Many observers say the opposition would win if the rules of the game were the same for everyone. For the first time in three years, he was allowed to hold a rally this month, after the government was under pressure for not issuing permits in the past. About 10,000 people were present, about twice as many as at the ruling party rallies, although in the past the government used force to quell protests and dismiss dissidents as terrorists.
"There is a huge popular wave for change," said Solih's campaign manager Mariya Ahmed Did. "President Yameen has not been given the mandate to trample on all Maldivian democracy and our Constitution, but that's what he's been doing for the past five years."
She said, "The Maldives may become another banana republic".
Yameen's campaign director, Adhlee Ismail, denied in a short telephone interview that the elections had been rigged. On Sunday, it was not clear how long it would take to calculate the results.
Even if Yameen were to lose, China's influence would not be reduced, according to some observers. The United States and India do not want or can not compete with the billions of dollars that Beijing has invested in areas of South Asia where there is not enough money for its One Belt initiative. One Road ». China spends about $ 62 billion on Pakistan alone under the program, squeezing another US ally into its axis.
"If President Yameen loses, China will be able to work with the next leader, as he has shown in the case of Sri Lanka after the 2015 elections," said Nilanthi Samaranayake, Center for Naval Analysis analyst. . tank based in Arlington, Virginia. For small countries in the region, China's call as a source of financing for development "transcends domestic politics," she said.
Sri Lanka's current leadership won elections in 2015 on a critical platform against China, accusing the previous president of borrowing billions of dollars from Chinese state-owned banks for unprofitable projects. But once the new government came to power, he found that India and the United States had little to offer in terms of development loans and that they finally warmed up in Beijing. Last year, The Sri Lankan government handed over a major seaport to China for 99 years, unable to repay its loans.
In the Maldives and elsewhere, many are also wary of China's growing military interests. Despite assurances to the contrary, Beijing has steadily increased its presence on a collection of disputed reefs in the South China Sea, eventually building bases there.
The Maldives, part of China's One Belt, One Road projects, have received about $ 2 billion in Chinese loans that critics say are difficult to repay. The Chinese initiative was compared to the ambitious US Marshall Plan in Europe after the Second World War, but the Marshall Plan consisted mainly of grants rather than expensive loans, according to critics, and economically viable projects.
Mr. Yameen has been accused of corruption charges, including reports that he plans to sell some of the 1,200 islands that make up the Republic of Maldives for his personal gain, an accusation he denied.
Although the Maldivian government has stated that international journalists are welcome to report on the elections, many, including the New York Times, have not been able to obtain a visa to enter the country.
Maria Abi-Habib reported from New Delhi and Hassan Moosa from Malé, Maldives.
