A no-confidence motion against Nasheed

On May 2023, the changes that were going to be coming up in the political field of the Maldives became extremely evident as one of the biggest political parties, the Maldives Democratic Party (MDP) split into two different segments due to the rift between the two leaders.

With the current leader of MDP being the President of the Maldives and the founder, president and the face of the party being the current speaker of the Maldivian parliament Mohamed Nasheed, the power struggle within the party becoming quite evident - inevitably led to Nasheed forming his own political party ‘The Democrats’.

Following the formation of his own party, it was quite obvious that there was going to be a fall out, as the big question remained as to whether the loyal followers and members of MDP will continue to support the party or follow the 'supreme' leader of the party on his endeavour to bring the real changes that MDP stood for with the formation of The Democrats.

The upcoming political unrest was evident from the start as the formation of Nasheed’s new political party took a hit on MDP, which held a super-majority in the Maldivian parliament with 68 members, later reduced to 55 members as some of the members chose to leave MDP in order to join The Democrats. Not only this, but some of the leaders also started voicing out their reasoning for leaving MDP and choosing to follow Nasheed on this new journey. One of them is the deputy speaker of the parliament Eva Abdulla, as she hinted that the current MDP is not following the original values that the party stood for when it was formed.

Following these statements and the exchange of words between the two political parties, which initially started out as one, the Parliamentary group of MDP has now decided that they want to hold a no-confidence motion against the speaker of the parliament and the president of MDP, Mohamed Nasheed.

According to the leader of the Parliamentary Group, Mohamed Aslam, the members have concerns regarding how the speaker Mohamed Nasheed has been conducting the parliamentary session, especially in regard to how Nasheed handled the no-confidence motion that was filed against Attorney General Ibrahim Riffath following the mismanagement of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) matter between the Maldives and Mauritius. This concern was in particular raised after Nasheed stated that he would be seeking the supreme court’s opinion on how to proceed after the Attorney General failed to appear in person to speak after a no-confidence motion was filed against him, instead he sent his response in writing.

On 06 June 2023, the members of MDP claim that the speaker Nasheed must be removed from his position in order to ensure that the parliament of the Maldives is run smoothly, and this action can only be taken when a majority of the members vote for a no-confidence motion against Nasheed.

As the parliament currently has 87 sitting MPs, in order to get this no-confidence motion on track, MDP needs at least 44 votes. As the political party itself has 56 sitting members as of now, with enough signature of the members to file the motion, it was quite evident that this motion was going to go through easily for MDP, which still holds a majority of the members. 

While the members are still working on getting more votes to support this motion, the members have also gotten 50 MPs to sign a no-confidence motion against Vice-Speaker Eva Abdulla for similar reasoning, which has still not been put on the agenda of the Parliament.