Several hundred supporters quietly milled around outside the Nasandhura Palace Hotel in Male, where Yameen's Progressive Party of the Maldives (PPM) was holding court right after his 51.39 percent win in the 16 November Maldives presidential polls. Yameen's seemingly contradictory coalition of Islamists and resort tycoons triumphed in the run-off vote against the internationally-popular liberal democrat, former President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP).
Inside the hotel the man hogging the microphone was not the victorious presidential candidate but his half-brother, former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, surrounded by a coterie of his former ministers and aides jostling for a share in the spoils and cabinet. If anything, Yameen looked as surprised and confused as much of the Maldivian public. Just days before the revote, a sizeable section had switched their support from third placed Qasim Ibrahim to Yameen, hugely increasing his share of the vote from the 29.72 percent he received in the first round.
Many were clearly anti-Nasheed voters, persuaded not so much by the PPM's vague manifesto pledges of oil money and doctors in every household, but the intense negative campaigning against Nasheed by media outlets owned by the very candidates competing against him for Presidential office. The most successful of these was a sustained anti-campaign casting Nasheed as ladeenee, or 'irreligious', accusing him of consorting with "Jews, Freemasons and priests" to undermine Islam in the Maldives in favour of unspecified "other religions". Trying to face down the populist charge against him, and showing a side conflicting with his international image, Nasheed defended his religious track record at party rallies and on MDP-leaning channel Raajje TV, asserting, "There will be no room for another religion in this country under an MDP government. This is very clear."
However, the people Nasheed needed to reach out to had already been convinced by the viciously polarised media owned by Qasim and Yameen's political allies, which readily ignored religious hate speech from Yameen's camp while relentlessly pursuing the slightest bureaucratic infraction committed by MDP-aligned outlets.