Maldives president challenges election defeat

Maldives President Abdulla Yameen has filed a court challenge against his election loss, citing a “lot of complaints from supporters”, according to a lawyer.

The complaint was filed at the island nation’s Supreme Court on Wednesday, said Mohamed Saleem, the president’s lawyer. 

Yameen lost the September 23 election by a 16 percent margin to opposition leader, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, in an outcome hailed as a win for democracy in the crisis-hit Indian Ocean archipelago.

The result was widely accepted, including by the United States, China, India, and the European Union.

Yameen conceded defeat a day after the election, but has since alleged widespread irregularities in the vote.

The president, who says he will stay on in office until the end of his term on November 17, has offered little evidence to back his claim. 

Saleem, the president’s lawyer, told a pro-government television station that Yameen filed a “constitutional case” at the top court “after reviewing a lot of complaints from his supporters about the result of the vote”.

He declined to reveal details of the case, saying he will file evidence at the court.

Saleem confirmed submitting the case to Al Jazeera, but did not clarify if the president was seeking to overturn the election results.

In a statement on Tuesday, the ruling Progressive Party of the Maldives (PPM) said it was seeking legal recourse through the courts because the party has “been overwhelmed with numerous genuine concerns related to the elections, including serious allegations of vote rigging, fraud, malpractice and corruption”. 

The elections commission has previously dismissed the allegations as “false”, and said its staff have been “constantly” targeted with “threatening calls and messages” since the vote. 

A spokesman for the Supreme Court said judges have not made a decision on accepting the case yet.

‘Running out of options’

Mariya Ahmed Didi, spokesperson for president-elect Solih, said Yameen must respect the results of the election. 

“The people’s word on the matter is final,” she said. 

Solih, who won the election with more than 58 percent of the vote, was backed by a coalition of four opposition parties at the last minute, as Yameen had jailed or forced into exile nearly all of his political rivals over the course of his first five year term. 

Solih has vowed to restore democracy, release dissidents and investigate allegations of corruptionagainst Yameen.

Ahmed Mahloof, an opposition politician, said the “options are running out for Yameen”.

“He’s in a very tight place right now.” 

That’s because many high profile prisoners, including Yameen’s half-brother former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, have been released on bail since the election, Mahloof said, while dissidents in exile have started to return.

Mohamed Nasheed, the country’s first freely elected president whose arrest and jailing in 2015 triggered the Maldives’ protracted crisis, is expected to return on November 1. 

With the tables turning, Yameen was now facing impeachment through the parliament, where the opposition was hoping to regain its parliamentary majority, Mahloof said.

Yameen had stripped a dozen legislators of their seats after they defected to the opposition last year in order to preserve control over the 85-member house. But the Supreme Court reinstated four of the twelve earlier this week, raising hopes that the opposition could prevail in the parliament. 

However, Mahloof said there was uncertainty about what the top court may do next, as the president had sent in the army to arrest two of the court’s five judges in February.

His party later sacked the pair and appointed judges widely perceived as loyalists to the vacant posts. 

Transparency Maldives, an election monitoring group, called Yameen’s latest move “troubling”. 

It noted the Supreme Court in 2013 annulled the results of a first round of voting after Yameen came in second. He later won that election by a margin of 6,000 votes. 

“Although the pre-election environment was marred with serious issues, we note that the election day process was fairly smooth and any issues that were observed on election day were minor and would not affect the outcome of the elections,” the group’s executive director Mariyam Shiuna said in a statement to Al Jazeera. 

Mahloof meanwhile called on the security forces to prepare to defend the election results.

“Do not mess with the people’s decision,” he warned the president in a post on Twitter.

Both the army and the police have previously said they will uphold the results of the vote.