Galolhu North Member of Parliament (MP) Eva’s one-and-half-minute videoclip from a speech featured on SukunPlay shows her calling on everyone to vote during Saturday’s presidential election, failing which could come to pass the dreaded circumstance that the leadership of Maldives could go to the “other person” while we are “aware of what we don’t want”.
This seems to reflect the ruling Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP)'s belief that the Opposition candidate Muizzu won the council election and became the Maldives' capital Male' City's Mayor because people who subscribed to MDP's ideals did not turn up for voting in MDP's candidate Anas.
If we don’t vote, the presidency will "by de facto go to the one we don’t want”, Eva said in this speech.
However, from her speech, it is evident that she fails to understand what ordinary Maldivian citizens mean by the “lesser evil” candidate, the masses been of the view that all Maldivian politicians without exception are unprincipled, unethical, corrupt, immoral, and have no integrity.
She said that though she tried to translate the “lesser evil” into Dhivehi (language), she doesn’t want to do that because she is a politician and that, in her capacity as a politician, she doesn’t see any “evil” and instead, it was a matter of “different candidates having different policies”.
Hence, she seems to be of the opinion that we should not use the word "evil" to judge a candidate’s character and personality just because we don't agree with his “policy”. So, according to her, there is no “lesser evil” since there is no evil at all.
Therefore, now that she said that there is no “evil” at all, who exactly should we vote for? And why? Is there a point in voting in any particular candidate at all?
There’s not much difference in the policies outlined in the 8 candidates’ manifestos which largely and similarly make lofty pledges and promises of doing everything to develop Maldives, subsidize services, and try to provide everything for free to the greatest extent possible.
If that is the case, we can be happy with anyone been president. Voting seems pointless, as every candidate is deemed to be clean. It would be a waste of time and energy to go to the extent of waiting in queue for hours to cast ballots in an election where any candidate winning is deemed to be fine - at least according to Eva's logic.
NOTE: The above picture is a screenshot from the segment of Eva’s speech where she addresses the “issue” I have discussed in this blogpost. She speaks in Maldives’ native language Dhivehi and there are no accompanying English subtitles but if you still would like to check it out, here’s the link - https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSLcsw4DP/
"There’s not much difference in the policies outlined in the 8 candidates’ manifestos which largely and similarly make lofty pledges and promises of doing everything to develop Maldives, subsidize services, and try to provide everything for free to the greatest extent possible." yes, exactly. all the candidates promise freebies which will be financed by more borrowings. There are no real difference in their policies. The people you see passionate about voting are those that actually benefit more from the freebies than the rest of us.
ReplyDeleteAll the candidates did not promise freebies. But it's obvious the independent candidates won't win as the majority people are too much into party politics and it's become quite clear by now who the major parties in this country are.
Delete👍
DeleteI guess everything always boils down to self-interest. But some people are of the opinion that religion and patriotism take priority than even family ties. Hence, they believe that there's enmity now even among nuclear families ever since Maldives embraced the political party system.
ReplyDeleteI think she's making a good point. I feel it's our duty to try and stop someone who already drowned the country in debt and says he still plans on taking on more debt eventhough he uses a nice word to hide what he's going to do.
ReplyDelete😀
Delete