MALE, Maldives — Voters in the Maldives went to the polls Saturday amid hopes that questions about the legitimacy of the government would finally be answered 19 months after the ouster of the first democratically elected president in the country, best known for its luxury island resorts.
About 240,000 people were eligible to vote in the election to pick a leader from among four candidates.
The candidates included the Indian Ocean archipelago’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, who said he was ousted in a coup.
The Elections Commission announced early Sunday that former President Mohamed Nasheed had received 45 percent of the vote in Saturday’s election. He will face Yaamin Abdul Qayyoom, a brother of Maldives’ former autocrat Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, in a runoff Sept. 28. Qayyoom received 25 percent of the vote.
Nasheed needed to receive more than 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff.
Nasheed, who won the country’s first multiparty election in 2008, ending 30 years of autocracy, resigned last year after weeks of public protests and slipping support from the military and police. He later said he was forced to resign at gunpoint by mutinying security forces and politicians backed by the country’s former autocrat.
His fall from power came after he ordered the military to arrest a senior judge whom he accused of bias.
Although a domestic commission of inquiry has dismissed Nasheed’s claim, the country has been in political turmoil ever since. Nasheed has repeatedly dismissed as illegal the government of his former vice president — current President Mohamed Waheed Hassan, who was also an election candidate.
Nasheed and Hassan were competing against Qayyoom and businessman Qasim Ibrahim.
The next president must form a credible government, build up public confidence in government institutions that are accused of political bias, such as the courts, police and military, and deal with pressing issues, including high unemployment, increasing drug addiction among young people and improving transportation among the nation’s far-off islands in the Indian Ocean.
